Staff Software Engineer

ServiceNow · Hyderabad, , India

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • Posted 2026-09-21
  • Confirmed live on 25 September 2026

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Job description

Job Description
This role is for a staff engineer who independently leads 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.
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 third-party AI/ML services a

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