Principal Machine Learning Engineer - Agentic AI

Company Description
It all started in sunny San Diego, California in 2004 when a visionary engineer, Fred Luddy, saw the potential to transform how we work. Fast forward to today - ServiceNow stands as a global market leader, bringing innovative AI-enhanced technology to over 8,100 customers, including 85% of the Fortune 500®. Our intelligent cloud-based platform seamlessly connects people, systems, and processes to empower organizations to find smarter, faster, and better ways to work. But this is just the beginning of our journey. Join us as we pursue our purpose to make the world work better for everyone.
Job Description
PLATO (Platform Engineering and AI Technology Organization) at ServiceNow is a customer-focused innovative group building intelligent software using a variety of technology stacks to enable end-to-end, industry-leading work experiences for our customers. We are a group of people deeply invested in the success of our customers that happen to have expertise and knowledge in advanced technologies and software engineering best practices. We are data driven, structured, committed and we enjoy what we are doing. We prioritize robustness, performance and user experience over the technology stack and tools.
This role requires a Principal ML Engineer with proven expertise in Agentic AI Design to lead the development of autonomous AI systems and multi-agent workflows. You will architect and implement sophisticated agentic solutions that can reason, plan, and execute complex tasks with minimal human intervention. Your experience designing agent frameworks, orchestration patterns, and tool-use capabilities will be critical as we scale our agentic AI offerings across the ServiceNow Platform. You will drive architectural decisions for agent systems, establish best practices for agentic workflows, ensure AI safety and reliability, and build the technical foundation that enables hundreds of AI agents to operate securely and effectively in enterprise environments.
You will play a major part in building AI and Machine Learning (ML) solutions that transform the user experience and workflow efficiency of enterprise services. Traditional analytical tools tend to require a technically knowledgeable user to produce even simple results. We are taking a completely fresh approach with the expectation that any user, regardless of technical knowledge, can use the AI/ML solutions we develop to operate the services in the enterprise setting in a thoughtful and scalable manner. We are just getting started with our early-adopter customers and we need your help in building and making available an amazing range of solutions to our 5k+ enterprise customers around the world.
What you get to do in this role:

• Design and architect multi-agent systems with sophisticated reasoning, planning, and tool-use capabilities
• Build agent orchestration frameworks that coordinate multiple specialized agents to solve complex enterprise workflows
• Develop agentic patterns including ReAct, Chain-of-Thought, Tree-of-Thoughts, and self-reflection mechanisms
• Implement robust agent memory systems, context management, and state persistence for long-running agentic workflows
• Create evaluation frameworks and safety guardrails specifically for autonomous agent behavior
• Build the best cloud-based agentic AI/ML solutions to power intelligent, autonomous enterprise services
• Collaborate daily with a team of like-minded developers, product managers and quality engineers to produce quality agent-based software
• Work with product owners to understand detailed requirements and own your code from design, implementation, testing and delivery of high-quality agentic solutions to our users
• Develop adversarial testing strategies for agent systems and implement safety mechanisms to prevent harmful agent behaviors
• Ensure secure agent deployment with proper sandboxing, permission management, and audit capabilities
• Ensure compliance with emerging AI safety regulations for autonomous systems (e.g., EU AI Act, NIST AI Risk Management Framework)
• Deliver MVP and production agent systems rapidly leveraging working experience with the ServiceNow Platform
• Make architectural trade-off decisions for agent systems that reduce rework and technical debt

Qualifications
To be successful in this role you have:

• Experience in leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving. This may include using AI-powered tools, automating workflows, analyzing AI-driven insights, or exploring AI's potential impact on the function or industry.
• Proficient in prompt engineering and developing LLM based features
• Proven experience designing and implementing agentic AI systems with autonomous reasoning and planning capabilities
• Deep expertise in agent architectures including tool-use patterns, function calling, and multi-agent orchestration
• Experience building agent frameworks with memory systems, context windows, and state management
• Hands-on experience implementing agentic patterns: ReAct, ReWOO, Plan-and-Execute, Reflection, and multi-agent collaboration
• Strong background in prompt engineering for agent systems, including system prompts, few-shot learning, and chain-of-thought prompting
• Experience with methods of training and fine-tuning large language models, such as distillation, supervised fine-tunning and policy optimization
• Experience in using AI productivity tools such as Cursor, Windsurf, etc
• Demonstrate technical leadership: experience in developing architecture and owned complex systems
• Expertise in Python, GO, OOP, Design Patterns, time and space-efficient algorithms
• Experience building prototypes, proof of concepts to prove ideas and working with engineering teams to productionize them
• Expertise in coding efficiently, object-oriented, modularized and quality software
• Knowledge of core AI/ML techniques and algorithms
• Knowledge of unit testing, profiling, and code tuning
• Experience with Kubernetes and container technologies.

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $236,000 - $413,000, 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 persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service.
Equal Opportunity Employer
ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or nationality, ancestry, age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status, veteran status, or any other category protected by law. In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements.
Accommodations
We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, please contact [email protected] for assistance.
Export Control Regulations
For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities.
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