Principal Machine Learning Engineer (AI)

Location: Santa Clara, California, United States. Region: North America and Canada. Work persona: Flexible.

Base pay: $240,100–$420,200 per year, plus equity where applicable, variable or incentive compensation, and benefits.

Company

ServiceNow builds an AI platform that connects data, workflows, and enterprise applications for large-scale business operations.

What you will do

• Design and ship production-grade multi-agent systems with orchestration, tool use, planning loops, memory, and failure recovery.
• Build agents grounded in enterprise data from CMDB, Workflow Data Fabric, and Knowledge Graph.
• Develop guardrails, observability, human-in-the-loop controls, and compliance infrastructure for safe autonomous systems.
• Build and optimize RAG pipelines, hybrid search, re-ranking, and retrieval evaluation.
• Integrate Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI models into Sense–Decide–Act–Govern architectures and evaluate production trade-offs.
• Own architecture decisions, lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and design scalable deployments across hyperscalers and internal infrastructure.

Requirements

• 9+ years of software engineering experience with strong data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Hands-on experience designing, shipping, and operating agentic systems in production.
• Production-grade Python; Go, Java, or C++ experience is beneficial.
• Experience with Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI AI SDKs, prompt engineering, structured outputs, and production model evaluation.
• Production experience with RAG, vector stores, hybrid search, and retrieval evaluation metrics.
• Technical leadership experience, including architecture ownership, raising code quality standards, and mentoring engineers.

Nice to have

• Specialization in large-scale search and retrieval or MLOps and model observability.
• Published work or open-source contributions in agentic systems or retrieval.
• Experience with LLM fine-tuning or inference optimization in production.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible work persona based on the nature of the role and assigned work location.
• Health plans, flexible spending accounts, and a 401(k) plan with company match.
• Employee stock purchase plan and matching donations.
• Flexible time away plan and family leave programs.
• Work on production AI systems serving Fortune 500-scale enterprise workflows.