Staff Software Engineer

ServiceNow · Santa Clara, CALIFORNIA, United States

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • $176,100 – $308,200
  • Posted 2026-09-22
  • Confirmed live on 25 September 2026

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Job description

Job Description
As a Staff Engineer, you will independently lead the design, development, and delivery of complex, high-impact AI-native and cloud-native systems. The IC4 engineer takes ownership of critical components or features, sets technical direction within their domain, and serves as a technical resource to peers and junior engineers. They combine deep software engineering fundamentals with hands-on expertise in AI/ML integration, cloud architecture, and production systems. This role requires the ability to balance technical depth with organizational impact, working across teams to solve ambiguous problems and drive platform improvements.
What you get to do in this role:
Responsibility Area: Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Lead the design and architecture of complex, production-critical AI-native systems, including LLM integrations, agentic workflows, retrieval pipelines, and inference services

• Own end-to-end delivery of medium-to-large features or systems, including specification, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring

• Make informed architectural and technical trade-off decisions between latency, cost, scalability, reliability, and model quality

• Establish evaluation frameworks, testing strategies, and production monitoring for AI-driven features; drive adoption of eval-driven development practices

• Design and optimize high-performance data pipelines, embedding systems, and vector stores handling millions of rows and complex retrieval scenarios

• Champion security best practices, including prompt-injection defense, data privacy, PII handling, responsible AI guardrails, and compliance with regulatory requirements

• Participate in architectural reviews across teams and contribute to platform-level technical decisions

• Stay current with emerging AI/ML frameworks, services, and techniques; evaluate and recommend adoption where applicable
Responsibility Area: Mentorship & Technical Influence

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers (IC2/IC3) through pair programming, design reviews, architecture discussions, and hands-on coaching

• Conduct thorough code reviews, including evaluation of prompts, agent logic, retrieval strategies, and AI/model behavior validation

• Identify technical debt and improvement opportunities; advocate for and lead initiatives to address them

• Share knowledge through documentation, brown-bag sessions, and architectural guidance

• Contribute to hiring and interview processes; provide technical assessment and feedback on engineering candidates

• Model best practices in software craftsmanship, testing discipline, and debugging methodology

• Support onboarding of new team members and ensure knowledge transfer across projects
Responsibility Area: Cross-Functional Collaboration & Communication

• Work closely with product management, domain specialists, and other engineering teams to define requirements and technical specifications

• Translate complex technical concepts and AI trade-offs for non-technical stakeholders (product, leadership, customers)

• Lead root cause analysis for customer-reported issues, including those involving model behavior, hallucinations, retrieval quality, and distributed system complexity

• Participate in design reviews, technical planning sessions, and retrospectives; contribute perspectives on technical feasibility and risk

• Communicate clearly about design decisions, implementation challenges, AI limitations, and production incidents

• Build and maintain relationships with adjacent teams and external partners where applicable

• Proactively identify opportunities to improve development processes, tooling, and team efficiency
Responsibility Area: Software Development Excellence

• Develop robust, maintainable, and well-tested AI-native software using Python, Java, and JavaScript as appropriate

• Build comprehensive unit tests, integration tests, and AI evaluation harnesses (accuracy, regression, hallucination detection)

• Troubleshoot complex issues in distributed systems, probabilistic models, and cloud infrastructure; isolate root causes efficiently

• Implement secure coding practices and responsible AI guardrails throughout the development lifecycle

• Manage deployment, monitoring, and iteration of features in production; respond to performance issues and model drift

• Work with cloud services (AWS/GCP/Azure), managed AI services (Bedrock, Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI), Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines

• Contribute to code and architecture standards; ensure adherence to established best practices
Responsibility Area: ServiceNow Platform Development

• Design and develop custom applications, extensions, and integrations on the ServiceNow platform

• Develop workflows, business rules, and automation using ServiceNow scripting (JavaScript, GlideScript, REST APIs)

• Build data models, forms, and dashboards for ServiceNow applications; optimize database queries for performance

• Integrate thir

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