Six Figure Work

Staff Machine Learning Engineer

ServiceNow

Company websiteservicenow.com (ServiceNow, opens in new tab)

Base salary $176,100  to $308,200

Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in Santa Clara, CA

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  • LocationSanta Clara, CA
  • WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (8 min ago) · observed since

About this job

Company Description

It 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 Description

About the Team

The Agentic Engineering organization at ServiceNow is the customer-obsessed engineering group that builds a conversational AI experience that turns enterprise intent into completed work. We advance how enterprise AI reasons, remembers, and executes.

The Agent Orchestration team — the team you'll join — owns the execution core: the agent harness, orchestration runtime, multi-agent coordination, memory management, and the evaluation frameworks that ensure agents behave correctly in production. Every autonomous action Otto promises depends on what this team ships.

By joining our team, you’ll be at the forefront of our AI transformation journey, backed by the global scale of ServiceNow and the agility of a high-growth environment. We are looking for world-class talent to help us extend agentic AI to every employee across every corner of the business

What you get to do in this role:

As a Staff AI Engineer, you will own significant parts of the agent harness — the infrastructure layer that enables AI agents to reason over real enterprise data, take action across workflows, and run safely at Fortune 500 scale.

  • Harness engineering: Design and build the agent execution harness — the orchestration layer that routes inputs, manages context, invokes tools, handles retries, and surfaces execution state across multi-step agentic workflows
  • Reliability at scale: Own the runtime's fault tolerance, latency, and throughput; design for enterprise workflows that cannot fail silently or unpredictably
  • Observability: Instrument the harness with tracing, cost attribution, and latency visibility so the team can reason about agent behavior in production and catch failures before customers do
  • Prompt infrastructure: Build prompt management systems — versioning, templating, and systematic evaluation — that keep agent behavior stable across model updates and configuration changes
  • Eval engineering: Design and own evaluation frameworks (unit evals, integration evals, production monitors) that measure agent quality, catch regressions, and drive data-informed decisions
  • LLM integration: Integrate with and abstract over frontier LLMs, managing model routing, fallback strategies, cost, and latency trade - offs in production
  • Technical leadership: Set technical standards through architecture decisions, code reviews, and coaching — particularly on agentic design patterns and production AI discipline.
  • System boundary design: Define where agent logic lives — what's a tool call, a sub-agent, a hardcoded path, or a human escalation — and establish those design standards across the team

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:

  • 7+ years building production software systems with a strong track record on reliability, performance, and scalability
  • Hands-on experience shipping generative AI products — not just integrating LLM APIs or building prototypes, but owning AI-powered features that production users depend on
  • Solid depth in how large language models work: failure modes, context constraints, and how prompt design shapes model behavior at scale
  • Python, Kubeflow,Experience with SageMaker, Vertex AI or AzureML, SQL
  • Practical prompt engineering experience: systematically designing, versioning, and evaluating prompts across model updates or A/B evaluation cycles
  • A real track record in eval engineering — not just familiarity, but a portfolio of evaluation suites designed, shipped, and used to drive quality decisions in production AI systems
  • Cost and efficiency awareness at the system level: experience reasoning about model routing, inference cost, and latency tradeoffs in production
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals: distributed systems, API design, and testing discipline
  • Comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous, startup-like AI product environments

Nice to Have

  • Experience with multi-agent coordination patterns (A2A, MCP)
  • Familiarity with agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar)
  • Prior experience shipping AI systems in enterprise software
  • Experience with AI observability tooling (tracing, cost tracking, LLM-specific monitoring)
  • Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure, service observability, logging, monitoring, reliability engineering, and production troubleshooting

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $176,100 - $308,200, 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.

Additional Information

Work Personas

We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here. To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service.

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. 

Export Control Regulations

For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities. 

From Fortune. ©2026 Fortune Media IP Limited. All rights reserved. Used under license.

Source: ServiceNow on SmartRecruiters · View original posting (opens in new tab)

Pay in context

This role's base floor ($176,100) is above 39% of the 1,502 Data & ML roles in California listed on this site; 8 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $189,000; the middle half runs from $159,256 to $229,900.

Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 6, 2026.

This range next to 6 other live ServiceNow roles with the nearest advertised base floor
Chart as a table
This range next to 6 other live ServiceNow roles with the nearest advertised base floor
RolePublished base
Staff Machine Learning Engineer (this listing)$176,100 - $308,200
Staff Machine Learning Engineer$176,100 - $308,200
Staff FinOps Analyst$176,100 - $308,200
Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Agentic App PlatformFrom $176,100
Staff Machine Learning Engineer, GAI Search Relevance - Moveworks$176,100 - $308,200
Staff Software Engineer$176,100 - $308,200
Staff Application Security Engineer (ServiceNow Instance Security)$176,100 - $308,200

Same $100K to $400K scale as every card. All ServiceNow roles · How to read the bar

Observed changes

  1. Began meeting the published-salary criteria
  2. First observed on the employer's board
Observed since
Employer-stated posting date
2026-11-06
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: Santa Clara, California, United States

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $176,100 - $308,200, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensa

Method
Employer text, read with fixed rules and re-verified
Checked
Rule set
us-base-v2

The pay passage appears in the employer's own job text. Fixed, deterministic rules located it, and the passage below was checked against the stored copy of the posting.

What we verified

  • The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
  • The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
  • The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.

We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.