Principal Machine Learning 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, 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.

Job Description In this role you will play a key role in defining and building the cloud-native infrastructure that powers Service Now's next generation of Agentic AI and conversational experiences. As a Principal Engineer, you will drive architecture and technical strategy across multiple engineering organizations while remaining deeply hands-on in solving complex platform and scalability challenges.

Lead the technical direction, architecture, and evolution of cloud-native platform services supporting Agentic AI initiatives.

Drive the design and implementation of scalable Kubernetes-based infrastructure that supports AI/ML and conversational workloads at enterprise scale.

Partner with engineering, infrastructure, product, and platform teams to modernize critical services and accelerate the transition to next-generation architectures.

Design and build highly available, secure, observable, and resilient distributed systems supporting mission-critical customer workloads.

Establish architectural standards, engineering best practices, and platform patterns that can be leveraged across multiple product teams.

Drive automation across infrastructure provisioning, deployment pipelines, service operations, monitoring, and incident response.

Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies in cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, AI platforms, and distributed systems.

Mentoring senior engineers and providing technical leadership through influence across organizational boundaries.

Lead architecture reviews and provide guidance on scalability, reliability, performance, security, and operational excellence.

Partner closely with teams developing AI-powered experiences to ensure underlying infrastructure can support future growth and innovation.

Work with stakeholders across the organization to balance long-term platform investments with near-term product delivery goals.

Own technical initiatives from concept through production deployment while helping shape the future direction of Service Now's Agentic AI platform. Qualifications To be successful in this role, you have:15+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems, cloud platforms, infrastructure services, or enterprise SaaS products.

Deep expertise in Java, Go, Python, or similar systems programming languages.

Proven experience designing, building, and operating highly scalable cloud-native architectures.

Expert knowledge of Kubernetes, containers, orchestration platforms, and modern cloud infrastructure.

Experience building platform services used across multiple engineering teams and products.

Strong understanding of distributed systems principles, including resiliency, fault tolerance, scalability, performance optimization, and observability.

Experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud at large scale.

Expertise in CI/CD, infrastructure automation, Git Ops, Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, or comparable technologies.

Strong software engineering fundamentals including object-oriented design, system design, architecture patterns, and performance optimization.

Experience leading technical strategy and…