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
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Search Infrastructure About the Role
Join us as we build the next generation of enterprise search infrastructure powering AI agents. Our mission is to evolve from traditional product-specific search systems into a composable, agent-native platform that enables agents and applications to discover, retrieve, reason over, and recommend information across heterogeneous enterprise data sources.
As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will be the technical owner for foundational search infrastructure that serves as the backbone of our agentic platform. You will drive the architecture, scalability, and evolution of core indexing and retrieval systems while partnering closely with Search Ranking, ML, Platform, and AI teams to deliver production-grade search capabilities that power agent experiences across the company.
What You'll Do Own Core Search Infrastructure
- Lead the design, development, and operation of critical search infrastructure components, including indexing systems, ingestion pipelines, metadata enrichment frameworks, and retrieval foundations that support a growing ecosystem of AI agents.
- Drive technical strategy and architectural decisions across multiple search infrastructure domains, ensuring the platform scales to support future agent use cases and expanding enterprise datasets.
- Serve as the technical authority for the end-to-end search lifecycle, from content ingestion through retrieval and ranking.
Build Next-Generation Indexing Systems
- Design and operate large-scale hybrid indexing architectures that combine sparse retrieval, dense vector search, semantic retrieval, and emerging indexing approaches.
- Establish clean abstractions and interfaces that allow downstream ranking systems and AI agents to leverage search capabilities consistently across multiple retrieval paradigms.
- Drive innovations that improve search quality, latency, scalability, and cost efficiency across billions of indexed entities.
Lead Enterprise Data Intelligence
- Architect high-throughput ingestion and enrichment pipelines that transform enterprise content into rich, permission-aware representations optimized for agent consumption.
- Define strategies for content parsing, chunking, embedding generation, entity extraction, metadata enrichment, and access control enforcement.
- Ensure consistency between index-time representations and query-time retrieval mechanisms to provide reliable foundations for agent reasoning.
Advance Multi-Modal Search
- Lead the evolution of indexing and retrieval systems across diverse enterprise content types, including text, structured data, images, diagrams, audio, and video.
- Develop unified frameworks that enable agents to discover and reason across modalities through a consistent retrieval experience.
- Partner with ML and AI teams to bring emerging multi-modal capabilities into production.
Drive Knowledge and Entity Infrastructure
- Contribute to the design and evolution of enterprise knowledge graph capabilities that connect people, content, tickets, documents, conversations, and business entities.
- Lead initiatives that improve entity resolution, relationship modeling, and contextual understanding throughout the search platform.
- Enable richer retrieval and agent reasoning through high-quality enterprise knowledge representations.
Scale Reliability and Performance
- Own key platform metrics including search latency, indexing throughput, retrieval quality, infrastructure efficiency, and cluster health.
- Drive operational excellence through observability, capacity planning, resiliency engineering, and lifecycle management.
- Lead efforts to optimize infrastructure costs while maintaining high-performance retrieval experiences at scale.
Technical Leadership
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship for engineers across the organization.
- Influence roadmap and architectural direction through technical vision, design reviews, and cross-functional collaboration.
- Drive alignment across Search Infrastructure, Ranking, ML, and Platform teams to deliver cohesive solutions to complex engineering challenges.
- Lead multi-quarter initiatives that span teams and materially advance the capabilities of the agentic search platform.
Qualifications Required
- BS or MS in Computer Science or a related technical field; PhD is a plus.
- 8-12+ years of industry experience building large-scale distributed systems, search platforms, or data infrastructure.
- Deep hands-on experience with search technologies such as Lucene, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, or comparable retrieval systems.
- Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale, including storage, indexing, serving, and data processing infrastructure.
- Experience building and scaling production systems that leverage vector search, embeddings, retrieval systems, or AI-driven search capabilities.
- Proven track record of leading complex technical initiatives across teams and influencing architectural decisions beyond an individual team's scope.
- Demonstrated ability to balance technical depth with pragmatic delivery and operational excellence.
For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $190,900 - $334,100, 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.
Preferred
- Experience with information retrieval, ranking systems, recommendation systems, or AI-powered search platforms.
- Experience with knowledge graphs, entity resolution systems, or enterprise data modeling.
- Familiarity with modern retrieval approaches including dense retrieval, RAG architectures, hybrid search, and semantic indexing.
- Experience operating large-scale search clusters and performance-sensitive distributed infrastructure.
- Background working closely with ML or AI platform teams to productionize intelligent retrieval systems.
Culture
- Passion for collaborating in a highly engaged, in-person engineering culture.
- Strong communication skills and a track record of influencing across organizational boundaries.
- Excitement for solving foundational infrastructure problems that unlock the next generation of AI agent experiences.
For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $190,900 - $334,100, 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 InformationWork 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.
Skills Required
- BS or MS in Computer Science or a related technical field
- 8-12+ years of industry experience building large-scale distributed systems, search platforms, or data infrastructure
- Deep hands-on experience with Lucene, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, or comparable retrieval systems
- Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale, including storage, indexing, serving, and data processing infrastructure
- Experience building and scaling production systems using vector search, embeddings, retrieval systems, or AI-driven search capabilities
- Track record of leading complex technical initiatives across teams and influencing architectural decisions beyond an individual team's scope
- Ability to balance technical depth with pragmatic delivery and operational excellence
- PhD
- Experience with information retrieval, ranking systems, recommendation systems, or AI-powered search platforms
- Experience with knowledge graphs, entity resolution systems, or enterprise data modeling
- Familiarity with dense retrieval, RAG architectures, hybrid search, and semantic indexing
- Experience operating large-scale search clusters and performance-sensitive distributed infrastructure
- Experience working with ML or AI platform teams to productionize intelligent retrieval systems
- Strong communication skills and experience influencing across organizational boundaries
ServiceNow Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage is described as robust, with multiple medical plan options, strong dental/vision, and access to mental-health resources. Feedback suggests the breadth and quality of healthcare offerings are standout aspects of the package.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Flexible PTO, paid holidays, company-wide wellbeing days, and paid volunteer time are emphasized. Feedback suggests these options provide meaningful flexibility and support for time away.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity is a notable part of total rewards, including RSUs and an employee stock purchase plan with a purchase discount. Feedback suggests these programs meaningfully enhance total compensation.
ServiceNow Insights
What We Do
As the AI platform for business transformation, we're putting AI to work across organizations — freeing people for work that matters. Making old tech work with new tech. Reaching across departments, from the front office to the back office and every office in between. Our ambition? To become the AI defining enterprise software company of the 21st century (or "AI DESCO21C," as we like to call it). With more than 8,400+ customers, we serve approximately 90% of the Fortune 500®, and we're proud to be a Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® and World's Most Admired Companies™. Explore your future career with us, visit www.careers.servicenow.com From Fortune. ©2026 Fortune Media IP Limited. All rights reserved. Used under license.
Why Work With Us
By joining ServiceNow, you are part of an ambitious team of change-makers who have a restless curiosity and a drive for ingenuity. We're committed to helping our people do their best work and live their best lives so we can fulfill our purpose together. At the fastest-growing enterprise software company, you can grow your career faster.
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