Principal Software Engineer

Google Chrome Microsoft Edge Apple Safari Mozilla Firefox Principal Software EngineerFull-timeEmployee Type: RegularRegion: AMS - North America and CanadaWork Persona: Flexible or RemoteCompany DescriptionIt 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 DescriptionPrincipal Software EngineerThe engineering organization is a dynamic group of builders, thinkers, and problem-solvers focused on delivering scalable, AI-powered software products that improve how organizations work. We value clean architecture, intuitive experiences, operational excellence, and a culture of continuous improvement. Every engineer plays an important role in shaping the quality, reliability, and long-term success of our products. About the Team: The Service Operations Business Unit brings together IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), and CMDB capabilities on the ServiceNow Platform. This product engineering organization builds the software that helps customers deliver resilient, intelligent, and efficient enterprise services. The Service Operations product portfolio connects incident, request, fulfillment, infrastructure visibility, service mapping, trusted configuration data, automation, and AIOps into a unified operating model. By combining service delivery with operational intelligence and trusted operational context, these products help customers move toward proactive, AI-assisted, and increasingly self-healing operations at enterprise scale. Together, these capabilities help customers modernize how they deliver and operate services, improve reliability, reduce manual effort, and drive measurable productivity outcomes on a single platform.  What you get to do in this role: As a Principal Software Engineer, you will architect and build assistive and autonomous AI-native products to usher customers (IT departments using our IT service and operation management applications) into an agentic-first era. The work will span large-scale distributed systems, data ingestion, context creation and utilization, agentic harnesses, cost optimization, agentic feedback loops to ensure value realization for our customers. This role requires thought leadership, deep technical expertise, strong architectural judgment, and a keen understanding of the scientific method to ship and refine real product through iterative experimentation. Responsibilities include: • Lead architecture and technical strategy for assigned problem areas within ITSM/ITOM products, working with product and engineering leaders to understand blockers and opportunities around AI-native evolution and value realization. • Contribute hands-on to spiking and shipping solutions. Validate architectural hypotheses through code, not theory. Build prototypes, reference implementations, and critical path components to prove feasibility and guide teams. • Design and validate solutions through evidence-based spiking: formulate hypotheses, run experiments, measure outcomes, and use data to guide architectural decisions and product direction. • Architect the evolution of current solutions toward AI-native capabilities—identifying where agentic patterns, data utilization, or autonomous workflows can unlock customer value. Translate architectural recommendations into executable work. • Identify and address value realization gaps in agentic products that exist...