Senior Research Engineer/Scientist

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.

What you'll do

• Own LLM mid-training and post-training research, including continued pretraining, SFT, preference optimization, and RL; make data-mixture and experimental decisions and determine how training changes affect downstream agent behavior.
• Research and prototype novel agentic architectures and algorithms across planning, reasoning, memory, skills, tool use, retrieval, and multi-agent collaboration, advancing beyond existing approaches where appropriate.
• Design and build research harnesses and experimentation methodologies that enable systematic experimentation, trajectory analysis, reproducibility, and rigorous comparison across models, checkpoints, and agent architectures.
• Define evaluation methodologies and develop novel benchmarks for measuring agent reasoning, planning, tool use, reliability, factuality, and safety; establish rigorous approaches for LLM-as-a-Judge, trajectory-based, and human evaluation.
• Identify systematic model and agent failure patterns, determine their root causes, and translate those insights into new research directions or improvements in training data, architecture, context, or evaluation.
• Independently identify research problems, formulate novel hypotheses, and drive projects from research idea to validated prototype and measurable impact, collaborating with engineering to transition successful approaches into production and communicating results through publications, patents, or open-source work.

• 5+ years of experience in machine learning, deep learning, AI research, or a related field, with demonstrated applied research experience and a track record of independently driving research projects.
• Hands-on experience with LLM training and post-training, including one or more of continued pretraining, SFT, preference optimization, or RL; experience making training-data decisions and understanding training dynamics and failure modes at scale.
• Strong Python and advanced PyTorch expertise, with experience modifying models, training pipelines, or research infrastructure to support novel experimentation.
• Strong practical depth in agentic AI and context engineering, including planning, reasoning, memory, skills, tool use, retrieval, long-context processing, and knowledge grounding.
• Experience designing evaluation methodologies, not just running evaluations, including benchmark design, trajectory-based evaluation, LLM-as-a-Judge, human evaluation, and the ability to determine which metrics and methodologies are appropriate for a research question.
• Demonstrated research ownership and impact, with the ability to identify important research questions, develop novel hypotheses, conduct rigorous experiments, and communicate findings and implications effectively to technical researchers, engineers, and executive stakeholders.

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. 

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