Principal Software Engineer - Platform Engineering Workflow Automation

Role overview

Architecture and technical direction

• Lead architecture and technical direction for problem areas across the workflow and automation portfolio.
• Work with product and engineering leads to identify blockers and architectural opportunities.
• Participate in design reviews and use data to challenge risky technical decisions.
• Balance long-term architecture with shipping speed, customer impact, engineering velocity, and business priorities.

Hands-on engineering

• Build prototypes and reference implementations to validate architectural ideas before broad adoption.
• Test ideas with experiments and real data rather than design documents alone.
• Document effective patterns and tradeoffs for reuse by other engineering teams.

AI-native workflow evolution

• Move workflow capabilities toward agentic execution, improved context and data use, more autonomous flows, and concrete engineering outcomes.
• Investigate underperforming agentic features across architecture, data, user experience, and cost model dimensions.
• Reason about data quality, workflow correctness, evaluation, safety controls, observability, and human-in-the-loop review.

Collaboration and mentoring

• Influence architecture across engineering teams through technical credibility and collaboration rather than formal authority.
• Share effective practices across teams and help reusable patterns spread faster.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise engineering standards.

Experience and technical qualifications

• 15+ years of engineering experience or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, workflow engines, integration frameworks, or cloud-scale infrastructure handling high transaction volumes.
• Deep understanding of system design for scale, reliability, observability, fault tolerance, data quality, security, and production readiness.
• Strong technical depth in Java, Python, or a comparable programming language.
• Proven ability to define technical direction and influence architecture across teams.

Preferred experience

• Experience with AI-powered products, automation platforms, AI-assisted workflows, or agentic systems is strongly preferred.
• Experience with workflow automation, business process management, low-code or no-code platforms, or process orchestration at scale is a strong plus.
• Experience with large-scale enterprise customers, production systems, or complex migration and modernization efforts is a plus.

Compensation

• The listed base pay range for this location is $221,200–$387,100, plus equity when applicable, variable or incentive compensation, and benefits.
• Individual total compensation varies based on qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location.

Work personas

• ServiceNow uses flexible, remote, and required-in-office work personas based on the nature of the work and assigned work location.
• Eligibility for a work persona may be determined using the distance between an employee's primary residence and the nearest ServiceNow office.

About ServiceNow