Principal Software Engineer

Job Description

The Role
As a Principal Engineer in HRSD, you set the technical direction for model-driven capability across the HR domain, the agentic and conversational experiences that interpret employee, manager, and HR agent intent, reason over profile, case, catalog, policy, and knowledge context, and act on the user’s behalf. Your unit of ownership is the architecture, standards, and evaluation infrastructure that let multiple teams ship those experiences safely — not a single feature set.

This is not an ML research role; you do not train foundation models. It is also distinct from traditional full-stack staff work, where systems follow deterministic logic. Two things shape the job: much of the load-bearing logic lives in natural language — instructions, prompts, context, tool descriptions, guardrails — and must be engineered with the same discipline as code; and because behavior is probabilistic, correctness is established through evaluation at scale, not fixed assertions.

What You’ll Own

• AI architecture for the domain. How agents are decomposed and composed, where reasoning happens, how context is assembled and bounded, how tools are exposed, and how autonomy is delegated. Own the multi-release calls: model selection and migration, orchestration approach, build-versus-adopt, and the cost/latency/quality tradeoffs behind each.

• The autonomy boundary. Decide as domain policy which HR actions an agent may take, which require a human decision point, and which no agent should attempt. Anything changing pay, employment status, restricted records, or employee-relations matters requires a human in the path by construction — build the mechanisms that make those constraints structural.

• The shared instruction and tool description surface. HRSD ships as product; customers configure, extend, and override this surface on their own instances. Treat it as a versioned contract with upgrade-safe extension points, deprecation paths, and compatibility guarantees.

• Evaluation as infrastructure. Own the golden datasets, multi-turn suites, judge calibration, CI gates, and drift detection that let teams change behavior safely. Extend coverage to HR-specific failure classes: access-boundary violations, cross-scope leakage, jurisdictional and policy-variant correctness.

• Production quality and safety. Observability for containment, hallucination rate, tool-selection error, unsafe action, and injection vectors from user-supplied content entering agent context. Because HR conversation content is itself restricted, design diagnosis that works without exposing what was said.

• AI-assisted engineering standards. Convert ambiguous problems into testable specs; define what accountable agent-assisted delivery looks like for the domain — specification standards, review expectations, verification harnesses — and hold the line on it.

• Hands-on where it matters. The hard integration, the risky migration, the prototype that settles an architectural argument, the incident nobody else can unblock.

• Partner across functions. Collaborate efficiently with product, engineering, design to co-create scalable AI solutions and translate business needs into robust technical designs.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of software engineering, with a record of technical direction adopted beyond your immediate team.

• Direct, hands-on experience authoring agentic instructions and prompts, designing autonomous workflows, and building the evaluation that verifies them.

• Production experience with LLM APIs, retrieval-grounded features, agent orchestration, tool and function calling, and structured output enforcement — including at least one model or orchestration migration carried through production.

• Entitlement-aware data handling: per-user access enforcement in retrieval and tool layers, scope separation between roles, and handling of restricted records under audit.

• Evaluation experience used by engineers other than yourself: dataset curation, judge calibration, CI gating, drift detection.

• Strong command of system design, APIs, data modeling, and testing across front-end, server-side, and relational data work with a high quality mindset.

• Effective, accountable use of AI coding assistants and agents.

• On-call and incident-command experience on customer-facing systems, including ownership of the systemic fixes that followed.

• Experience in software stack including Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, React and demonstrated ability to quickly learn new tools and frameworks.

• Bachelor’s degree in CS, software engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred

• HR domain depth: case management, employee journey and lifecycle, or payroll/benefits/leave/absence sufficient to set requirements.

• Integration with core HR, payroll, or benefits systems of record, including reconciliation and eventual-consistency patterns.

• Contribution in a Forward deployment model to champion customer adoption.

JV21

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $199,100 – $348,400, 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.

Work Personas

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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 [email protected] for assistance.

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