Staff Software Engineer - Federal

It all started when engineer Fred Luddy wrote code that automated a tedious task for his coworker, Phyllis. She cried tears of joy. That moment inspired Fred to build a company that could do that for everyone - freeing people from busywork so they could focus on meaningful work. Today, ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention. Our ServiceNow AI platform brings together any AI, any data, and any workflow - helping 85% of the Fortune 500 work smarter, faster, and better. We're building an AI-native culture where technology and talent are unstoppable together. And we're just getting started.

Join us to put AI to work for people.

Job Description

Position Location:
This is a Flexible (Hybrid) position based in Santa Clara, CA. Flexible positions require 2 days per week in our Santa Clara office location.

Please Note: This position will includesupporting our US Regulated Markets.
“This position requires passing a ServiceNow background screening, USFedPASS (US Federal Personnel Authorization Screening Standards). This includes a credit check, criminal/misdemeanor check and taking a drug test. Any employment is contingent upon passing the screening. Due to Federal requirements, only US citizens, US naturalized citizens or US Permanent Residents, holding a green card, will be considered. ”

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will independently lead 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.

What you get to do in this role:

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