Senior Manager - Machine Learning Engneering

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, Service Now is the AI control tower for business reinvention. Our Service Now 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.

What you get to do in this role

We are looking for a Senior Manager of Machine Learning Engineering to lead a team building the next generation of AI Search and Retrieval capabilities that power intelligent experiences across the Service Now platform including Conversational and Agentic experiences.

You will lead engineers and machine learning practitioners responsible for designing and delivering highly scalable search, retrieval, ranking, recommendation, and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems that enable users to discover information, generate insights, and accomplish work more effectively.

This leader will collaborate closely with Product Management, Applied AI, Platform Engineering, UX, and Quality Engineering to define strategy, execute roadmap commitments, and deliver AI-powered experiences that serve millions of users globally.

You will play a critical role in advancing the technologies powering Service Now AI Search, Knowledge Retrieval, and GenAI experiences, while building a high-performing engineering culture focused on innovation, quality, and business impact.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of software engineers and machine learning engineers building large-scale AI Search and retrieval systems.
• Drive the strategy, architecture, and execution for Search, Ranking, Relevance, Personalization, and RAG capabilities.
• Partner with Product Managers and architects to define and deliver innovative AI-powered experiences.
• Build scalable retrieval pipelines leveraging vector search, semantic search, ranking models, and large language models.
• Improve relevance, precision, recall, and overall search quality across structured and unstructured enterprise content.
• Establish architectural patterns for highly available, resilient, and performant distributed systems.
• Lead the development and production deployment of machine learning models and retrieval services at enterprise scale.
• Drive operational excellence, reliability, observability, and performance optimization across the platform.
• Mentor engineering leaders and individual contributors while fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and technical excellence.
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to evaluate emerging AI technologies and accelerate their adoption into customer-facing products.
• Balance short-term delivery goals with long-term technical investments and platform evolution.

To be successful in this role you have:

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with a Bachelor's degree, or 10+ years with a Master's degree, or equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing technical teams.
• Strong expertise in Java or Python and large-scale distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with Search technologies such as Lucene, Elasticsearch, Solr, Open Search, Algolia, Coveo, Glean, or similar platforms.
• Experience building and operating large-scale retrieval, ranking, recommendation, or search systems.
• Experience with modern AI/ML technologies, including LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, and…