Principal Software Engineer

ServiceNow · Santa Clara, California, United States

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • $221,200 – $387,100
  • Posted 2026-09-16
  • Confirmed live on 25 September 2026

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Job description

Job Description
About the Team
We are looking for an experienced Principal Software Engineer to own the end-to-end architecture of the platform that manages how our customers are licensed, metered, and billed for their subscriptions. This platform is the system of record for customer entitlements, usage measurement, overage calculation, and invoicing across the customer lifecycle — spanning finance, sales, engineering, and customer-facing experience.
At our scale, this is fundamentally a distributed systems problem: metering usage in real time across an evolving catalog of consumption-based and subscription pricing models, with strict requirements for accuracy, auditability, and low-latency processing. You will be the technical anchor ensuring these systems, owned across many interconnected teams, work coherently as one platform.
What you get to do in this role:

• Define and drive the technical vision and end-to-end architecture for the entitlement, usage metering, overage, and billing platform

• Define and maintain the data model and integration contracts across finance, sales/CRM, engineering, and customer-facing portals — and resolve cross-system risks such as data consistency, latency, and ownership gaps before they surface as production or billing issues

• Design for correctness under business-calendar constraints — billing cycles, dispute SLAs, and reconciliation windows

• Own production reliability for the platform — participate in on-call, guide root-cause analysis, and resolve systemic issues rather than applying one-off patches

• Shape billing and metering strategy for AI-driven products — including token-based consumption, agentic workflows, and MCP-based agent actions

• Guide teams through complex technical decisions and design reviews, establishing architecture standards for changes that touch the shared platform, and mentor senior/staff engineers on system design and cross-team tradeoffs

• Partner with Product, Finance, Sales Operations, and Engineering leadership to align platform roadmap with business needs

Qualifications
To be successful in this role you have:

• 12+ years of engineering experience (or equivalent depth), with significant time in distributed systems architecture

• Solid backend development experience in Java, Python, Go or equivalent, used in production at scale.

• Domain expertise in billing, licensing, or metering systems, with working knowledge of how these translate across finance, sales, and engineering

• Excellent fundamentals in distributed systems — consistency, fault tolerance, idempotency, exactly-once processing, and stream/batch data pipelines, including high-volume telemetry and event ingestion

• Solid fundamentals in databases and data modelling — schema design, performance tuning, and trade-offs across OLTP/OLAP stores

• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and container orchestration — deployment topologies, scaling and resource management, and operating stateful services in production

• Proven experience architecting systems that span multiple teams/orgs with independent ownership boundaries

• Proven experience architecting systems that span multiple teams/orgs with clearly defined ownership boundaries

• Excellent hands-on engineering ability — comfortable prototyping, validating architectural decisions through code, and contributing directly on critical-path components

• Ability to operate as a Principal IC by leading through technical credibility, collaboration, and influence rather than formal authority
Nice to Have

• Experience with enterprise SaaS licensing or subscription-management platforms

• Experience with usage-based billing integrations

• Experience designing or evolving pricing/metering models for AI, agentic, or MCP-based products

• Familiarity with M&A technical integration — bringing acquired products' usage/billing data into an existing platform

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $221,200 - $387,100, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation and benefits. Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure. Please note that the base pay shown is a guideline, and individual total compensation will vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location. We also offer health plans, including flexible spending accounts, a 401(k) Plan with company match, ESPP, matching donations, a flexible time away plan and family leave programs. Compensation is based on the geographic location in which the role is located and is subject to change based on work location.

Additional Information
Work Personas
We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here. To determine eligibility for a work pers

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