ServiceNow

Senior Applied Research Scientist

ServiceNow$100K — $130K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 4+ years experience in building production software systems focusing on reliability and scalability
  • Hands-on experience with generative AI products beyond mere API integration
  • Deep understanding of large language models and their operational dynamics
  • Experience in systematic prompt engineering and evaluation
  • Proven history in evaluation engineering for production AI systems
  • Cost and efficiency awareness at the system level
  • Strong background in distributed systems and API design

Responsibilities

  • Design and build the agent execution harness for orchestrating multi-step workflows
  • Ensure runtime reliability, fault tolerance, and performance at enterprise scale
  • Instrument the system for observability to catch issues preemptively
  • Develop prompt management systems to stabilize agent behavior during updates
  • Create and manage evaluation frameworks to monitor agent quality and prevent regressions
  • Integrate large language models with focus on performance trade-offs
  • Provide technical leadership through code reviews and architecture decisions

Benefits

  • Flexible work personas allowing remote, hybrid, or office-based work
  • Opportunity to work at the forefront of AI transformation
  • Engagement in a customer-obsessed culture focused on AI impact
  • Exposure to global scale operations of a leading software company
  • Agile and fast-paced work environment promoting innovation
Full Job Description
Job Description

About the Team

The Agentic Engineering org 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.

L'équipe

L'organisation Agentic Engineering chez ServiceNow est le groupe d'ingénierie obsédé par le client qui conçoit une expérience d'IA conversationnelle transformant l'intention d'entreprise en travail accompli. Nous faisons progresser la façon dont l'IA d'entreprise raisonne, se souvient et exécute.

L'équipe Agent Orchestration - celle que vous rejoindrez - possède le cœur d'exécution : le harnais d'agent, le moteur d'orchestration, la coordination multi-agents, la gestion de la mémoire, ainsi que les cadres d'évaluation qui garantissent que les agents se comportent correctement en production. Chaque action autonome promise par Otto dépend de ce que cette équipe livre.

En rejoignant notre équipe, vous serez à l'avant-garde de notre transformation IA, soutenu(e) par l'envergure mondiale de ServiceNow et l'agilité d'un environnement à forte croissance. Nous recherchons des talents de classe mondiale pour nous aider à étendre l'IA agentique à chaque employé, dans tous les secteurs de l'entreprise.

What You'll Do

As a Senior Applied Research Scientist, 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 non-deterministically
  • 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 tradeoffs in production
  • Technical leadership: Raise the technical bar 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.

Role

En tant que Chercheur(euse) Scientifique Appliqué(e) Senior, vous serez responsable de parties importantes du harnais d'agent - la couche d'infrastructure qui permet aux agents IA de raisonner sur des données réelles d'entreprise, d'agir à travers les flux de travail, et de fonctionner en toute sécurité à l'échelle Fortune 500.
  • Ingénierie du harnais : Concevoir et construire le harnais d'exécution des agents - la couche d'orchestration qui achemine les entrées, gère le contexte, invoque les outils, gère les nouvelles tentatives et affiche l'état d'exécution à travers des flux de travail agentiques multi-étapes
  • Fiabilité à l'échelle : Assurer la tolérance aux pannes, la latence et le débit du moteur d'exécution ; concevoir pour des flux de travail d'entreprise qui ne peuvent pas échouer silencieusement ou de manière non déterministe
  • Observabilité : Instrumenter le harnais avec du traçage, l'attribution des coûts et la visibilité de la latence afin que l'équipe puisse comprendre le comportement des agents en production et détecter les défaillances avant les clients
  • Infrastructure de prompts : Construire des systèmes de gestion de prompts - versionnage, création de modèles et évaluation systématique - qui maintiennent la stabilité du comportement des agents malgré les mises à jour de modèles et les changements de configuration
  • Ingénierie d'évaluation : Concevoir et gérer des cadres d'évaluation (évaluations unitaires, évaluations d'intégration, moniteurs de production) qui mesurent la qualité des agents, détectent les régressions et orientent des décisions fondées sur les données
  • Intégration LLM : Intégrer et abstraire les LLM de pointe, en gérant le routage de modèles, les stratégies de repli, ainsi que les compromis entre coût et latence en production
  • Leadership technique : Élever le niveau technique par des décisions d'architecture, des revues de code et du mentorat - en particulier sur les modèles de conception agentiques et la discipline de production en IA
  • Conception des limites du système : Définir où réside la logique de l'agent - ce qui relève d'un appel d'outil, d'un sous-agent, d'un chemin codé en dur ou d'une escalade humaine - et établir ces normes de conception au sein de l'équipe


Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:
  • 4+ 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
  • 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

Pour réussir dans ce rôle, vous avez :
  • 4+ années d'expérience dans la construction de systèmes logiciels en production, avec un solide historique en matière de fiabilité, de performance et de scalabilité
  • Une expérience pratique du lancement de produits d'IA générative - pas seulement l'intégration d'API LLM ou la création de prototypes, mais la responsabilité de fonctionnalités basées sur l'IA dont dépendent les utilisateurs en production
  • Une solide compréhension du fonctionnement des grands modèles de langage : modes de défaillance, contraintes de contexte, et la façon dont la conception des prompts influence le comportement des modèles à grande échelle
  • Une expérience concrète en ingénierie de prompts : conception, versionnage et évaluation systématiques des prompts à travers les mises à jour de modèles ou les cycles d'évaluation A/B
  • Un véritable historique en ingénierie d'évaluation - pas seulement une familiarité, mais un portefeuille de suites d'évaluation conçues, livrées et utilisées pour orienter des décisions de qualité dans des systèmes d'IA en production
  • Une sensibilité aux coûts et à l'efficacité au niveau du système : expérience dans l'analyse du routage de modèles, du coût d'inférence et des compromis de latence en production
  • De solides fondamentaux en génie logiciel : systèmes distribués, conception d'API et discipline de test
  • À l'aise dans des environnements de produits IA rapides, ambigus, de type start-up

Atouts supplémentaires
  • Expérience avec les modèles de coordination multi-agents (A2A, MCP)
  • Familiarité avec les cadres d'agents (LangChain, LlamaIndex ou similaires)
  • Expérience antérieure dans le déploiement de systèmes d'IA en logiciel d'entreprise
  • Expérience avec les outils d'observabilité IA (traçage, suivi des coûts, surveillance spécifique aux LLM)
  • Familiarité avec l'infrastructure cloud-native, l'observabilité des services, la journalisation, la surveillance, l'ingénierie de la fiabilité et le dépannage en production.


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.

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow provides cloud-based solutions that define, structure, manage, and automate services for enterprise operations in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia Pacific, and other countries. The company offers service management solutions, including incident, problem, change, request, and cost management as well as service catalogs; and IT, HR, facilities, and field service management solutions. It also provides IT operations management solutions covering service mapping, delivery, and assurance solutions; business management solutions such as financial management, project portfolio suite, vendor performance management, and performance analytics as well as governance, risk, and compliance; and application development services.

ServiceNow Careers

Join the dynamic team at ServiceNow, a global leader in digital workflow solutions, where innovation and leadership converge to shape the future of work. At ServiceNow, we offer more than just job opportunities; we provide a platform for professional growth and a chance to be part of a culture that values diversity, creativity, and continuous learning.

Work You’ll Do

Embark on a career journey with ServiceNow and contribute to the world’s leading enterprises' digital transformation. Our team is at the forefront of developing cutting-edge technologies that improve how people work. With ServiceNow, you will use your skills to impact businesses and industries profoundly, driving efficiency and innovation.

Join Our Market-Leading Team

ServiceNow is not just another technology company. We are a team that thrives on diversity and leadership, fostering an inclusive environment that promotes growth and development. Our commitment to diversity training ensures that every team member can achieve their potential.

Innovative Work

ServiceNow is home to more than 10,000 dedicated professionals who lead the charge in digital workflows and enterprise solutions. As part of our team, you will engage in projects that merge technology with practical applications, creating revolutionary products that advance how services are delivered and managed.

Career Development

At ServiceNow, your career trajectory is filled with boundless opportunities. We support your growth with robust training programs, leadership development courses, and access to global challenges. Whether you are looking for an internship, full-time position, or leadership role, ServiceNow equips you with the tools to excel.

Be Part of a Great Team

Working at ServiceNow means being part of a community that values teamwork and innovation. Our collaborative environment encourages networking and sharing ideas, making our workplace vibrant and dynamic. The benefits of joining ServiceNow extend beyond comprehensive health and wellness; they include fostering professional connections and friendships that last a lifetime.

Explore Job Opportunities and Internships

Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a recent graduate, ServiceNow offers a range of employment options to suit your career goals. From internships that provide real-world experience to full-time positions that challenge you to leverage your expertise, we are committed to hiring the best talent.

Stay Connected

Join Our Team Search open positions that match your skills and interests. At ServiceNow, we look for passionate, curious, and solution-driven team players. Explore the possibilities that await you at a company that is committed to your professional success.

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ServiceNow Careers

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Learn more about ServiceNow
Size
16,881 employees
Market Cap
$76.5 billion
Industry
Net Income
$118.5 million
Founded
2004
5 Year Trend
+33.5%
Revenue
$4.5 billion
NASDAQ

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