Principal Machine Learning Engineer - Agentic AI

Company: ServiceNow
Location: Santa Clara
Posted on: March 22, 2026

Job Description:

PLATO (Platform Engineering and AI Technology Organization) at ServiceNow is a customer-focused innovative group building intelligent software using a variety of technology stacks to enable end-to-end, industry-leading work experiences for our customers. We are a group of people deeply invested in the success of our customers that happen to have expertise and knowledge in advanced technologies and software engineering best practices. We are data driven, structured, committed and we enjoy what we are doing. We prioritize robustness, performance and user experience over the technology stack and tools. This role requires a Principal ML Engineer with proven expertise in Agentic AI Design to lead the development of autonomous AI systems and multi-agent workflows. You will architect and implement sophisticated agentic solutions that can reason, plan, and execute complex tasks with minimal human intervention. Your experience designing agent frameworks, orchestration patterns, and tool-use capabilities will be critical as we scale our agentic AI offerings across the ServiceNow Platform. You will drive architectural decisions for agent systems, establish best practices for agentic workflows, ensure AI safety and reliability, and build the technical foundation that enables hundreds of AI agents to operate securely and effectively in enterprise environments. You will play a major part in building AI and Machine Learning (ML) solutions that transform the user experience and workflow efficiency of enterprise services. Traditional analytical tools tend to require a technically knowledgeable user to produce even simple results. We are taking a completely fresh approach with the expectation that any user, regardless of technical knowledge, can use the AI/ML solutions we develop to operate the services in the enterprise setting in a thoughtful and scalable manner. We are just getting started with our early-adopter customers and we need your help in building and making available an amazing range of solutions to our 5k enterprise customers around the world. What you get to do in this role: • Design and architect multi-agent systems with sophisticated reasoning, planning, and tool-use capabilities • Build agent orchestration frameworks that coordinate multiple specialized agents to solve complex enterprise workflows • Develop agentic patterns including ReAct, Chain-of-Thought, Tree-of-Thoughts, and self-reflection mechanisms • Implement robust agent memory systems, context management, and state persistence for long-running agentic workflows • Create evaluation frameworks and safety guardrails specifically for autonomous agent behavior • Build the best cloud-based agentic AI/ML solutions to power intelligent, autonomous enterprise services • Collaborate daily with a team of like-minded developers, product managers and quality engineers to produce quality agent-based software • Work with product owners to understand detailed requirements and own your code from design, implementation, testing and delivery of high-quality agentic solutions to our users • Develop adversarial testing strategies for agent systems and implement safety mechanisms to prevent harmful agent behaviors • Ensure secure agent deployment with proper sandboxing, permission management, and audit capabilities • Ensure compliance with emerging AI safety regulations for autonomous systems (e.g., EU AI Act, NIST AI Risk Management Framework) • Deliver MVP and production agent systems rapidly leveraging working experience with the ServiceNow Platform • Make architectural trade-off decisions for agent systems that reduce rework and technical debt Qualifications To be successful in this role you have: • Experience in leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving. This may include using AI-powered tools, automating workflows, analyzing AI-driven insights, or exploring AIs potential impact on the function or industry. • Proficient in prompt engineering and developing LLM based features • Proven experience designing and implementing agentic AI systems with autonomous reasoning and planning capabilities • Deep expertise in agent architectures including tool-use patterns, function calling, and multi-agent orchestration • Experience building agent frameworks with memory systems, context windows, and state management • Hands-on experience implementing agentic patterns: ReAct, ReWOO, Plan-and-Execute, Reflection, and multi-agent collaboration • Strong background in prompt engineering for agent systems, including system prompts, few-shot learning, and chain-of-thought prompting • Experience with methods of training and fine-tuning large language models, such as distillation, supervised fine-tunning and policy optimization • Experience in using AI productivity tools such as Cursor, Windsurf, etc • Demonstrate technical leadership: experience in developing architecture and owned complex systems • Expertise in Python, GO, OOP, Design Patterns, time and space-efficient algorithms • Experience building prototypes, proof of concepts to prove ideas and working with engineering teams to productionize them • Expertise in coding efficiently, object-oriented, modularized and quality software • Knowledge of core AI/ML techniques and algorithms • Knowledge of unit testing, profiling, and code tuning • Experience with Kubernetes and container technologies. For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $236,000 - $413,000, 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.

Keywords: ServiceNow, Milpitas , Principal Machine Learning Engineer - Agentic AI, IT / Software / Systems , Santa Clara, California