Sr Staff Software Engineer

Position Overview:

ServiceNow is seeking a highly motivated and experienced Senior Staff Software Engineer to help lead a team with a broad portfolio across the application lifecycle. The team owns key parts of a platform that lets customers author, build, and run custom applications at scale; works on a broader initiative modernizing how applications are distributed, licensed, and installed platform-wide; and helps maintain established backend systems that the broader platform depends on. This is a polyglot environment — strong Java proficiency is essential alongside modern JavaScript/TypeScript web application and backend service technologies.

This role requires both technical depth and leadership: setting direction across multiple concurrent initiatives while staying deeply hands-on, and negotiating technical boundaries with partner engineering teams on larger, cross-organizational efforts.

Key Responsibilities:

- Provide technical leadership across the team's portfolio of projects while staying deeply hands-on — setting direction and reviewing design, and also directly building, debugging, and shipping critical pieces yourself
- Diagnose and resolve complex, customer-impacting problems across established backend systems
- Champion engineering best practices and security standards across a varied technology footprint
- Bring sound judgment on where and how AI fits into the team's development workflow, and set guardrails for AI-assisted development
- Mentor engineers across the team's different technology areas, and foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement

Qualifications:

Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering work — whether using AI-powered coding and operational tooling, automating workflows, or reasoning about how AI changes the way software and infrastructure are built.

- 12+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with a strong track record delivering high-scale, cloud-based systems
- Deep proficiency in Java — hands-on experience designing, building, and maintaining production Java services, plus the ability to confidently read, debug, and modify complex, unfamiliar Java codebases
- Working proficiency in TypeScript/Node.js or similar modern web/backend stacks
- Strong understanding of concurrency and resource management for services operating at scale
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and service-to-service protocol design (e.g., gRPC/protobuf)
- Deep experience with authentication and session systems
- Proven experience leading and mentoring engineers, and negotiating technical scope across team boundaries
- Experience with Kubernetes-based service deployment is a plus
- Familiarity with large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS platforms is a strong plus
- Excellent problem-solving and communication skills, including cross-organizational technical negotiation
- Track record of applying AI to hard platform-engineering problems