Sr Staff Software Engineer

Company Description

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

Contribute to the org-wide shift from product-specific search solutions to a composable, agent-native infrastructure foundation that agents and applications build on to locate, search, discover, and recommend resources across heterogeneous enterprise data.

• Build and own the infrastructural substrate beneath the agentic search platform, spanning the index engine, the ingestion and enrichment pipeline, and the entity, identity, and feature intelligence that gives content context. Solve the hard problem of keeping index-time enrichments aligned with what agents expect at query time, so retrieval, ranking, and reasoning all build on a consistent foundation.

• Build and operate hybrid indexing technology at scale across large clusters, spanning keyword-based sparse-vector indices, embedding-based semantic indices, and emerging semantic-ID indexing driven by next-token prediction. Own the full index lifecycle, and expose clean, unified contracts to the search primitives and recipes that agents compose on top of the corpus.

• Design and run high-throughput ingestion and enrichment pipelines that produce a multi-representation, permission-aware corpus at index time. Orchestrate the stages that make content agent-ready, including parsing, chunking, embedding, entity resolution, and access control, and evolve them as new agentic use cases emerge.

• Build and operate multi-modal indexing across the full mix of enterprise data, from free text and structured content such as tables to diagrams, images, and audio and video. Represent each modality so it is retrievable through a unified surface, letting agents find the right material regardless of its form or source.

• Contribute to a knowledge graph that resolves entities across enterprise data sources, letting agents link disparate resources such as tickets, files, and people through canonical entity relationships.

• Improve the performance, scalability, and observability of search, including query latency, indexing throughput, and cluster health, to deliver low-latency, high-quality agentic search experiences. Apply techniques such as vector quantization to balance model quality, retrieval performance, and storage cost.

• Own search infrastructure end to end, from intake and design through rollout and ongoing operations, and help shape the search roadmap as the platform grows to support new agents, primitives, and recipes, including needs not yet anticipated.

• Drive reliability and operability across the platform through index lifecycle policies, capacity planning, and cluster scaling strategies that keep a growing library of reusable search capabilities healthy in production.

This is a highly collaborative, in-person role, working cross-functionally with Search Ranking, ML, and Platform engineering teams to deliver robust, production-grade agentic search capabilities.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in Computer Science or an equivalent engineering background; PhD is a plus.

• 8+ years of full-time industry experience.

• Hands-on experience with search technologies; proficiency in one or more search technologies such as Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch, or OpenSearch is required, with additional experience in vector databases being an advantage.

• Excited to be part of an in-person team culture, collaborating on-site with colleagues every day.

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $190,900 - $334,100, 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 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, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity, 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 View email address on click.appcast.io 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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