Staff Software Engineer - Federal

ServiceNow is an AI platform company helping organizations connect AI, data, and workflows. The Staff Software Engineer will lead the design, development, and delivery of complex AI-native, cloud-native, and ServiceNow platform systems while providing technical leadership, mentorship, customer support, and cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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 and custom APIs with ServiceNow platform services
• Contribute to and maintain ServiceNow plugin and app architecture; follow ServiceNow best practices and coding standards
• Participate in ServiceNow upgrades and configuration management; ensure compatibility with platform updates
• Mentor junior engineers on ServiceNow platform capabilities and development patterns
• Participate in customer issue triage and root cause analysis for production ServiceNow application issues
• Work closely with customer success and support teams to understand and resolve complex technical issues
• Provide technical guidance to customers on application usage, configuration, and troubleshooting
• Identify patterns in customer issues and drive improvements to prevent recurrence
• Contribute to customer documentation and internal knowledge bases
• Support customer escalations; provide timely resolutions to critical issues affecting customer operations
• Gather customer feedback and communicate product improvement opportunities back to product management