ServiceNow

Staff Research Engineer/Scientist

ServiceNow$202K — $354K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7+ years of relevant ML/AI research or engineering experience, or equivalent evidence of research depth and impact; PhD or advanced degree required.
  • Strong foundations in machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning, with hands-on experience training large language models or multi-modal models.
  • Advanced Python and PyTorch skills required, including modifying training loops and data pipelines.
  • Practical experience with agentic AI: tool use, planning, reasoning, memory, and multi-agent systems.
  • Proven track record of independently taking research from hypothesis to measurable outcomes.
  • Experience designing evaluations with strong dataset partitions and trajectory analysis.
  • Publications in top-tier venues like ICLR, NeurIPS, or ICML.

Responsibilities

  • Design and execute comprehensive research projects to enhance enterprise agents across various functionalities.
  • Research methods for model post-training, including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.
  • Optimize harness-level parameters and design effective tools and schema for improved agent performance.
  • Develop improvement flywheels to identify failure modes, curate data, and propose interventions based on production signals.
  • Create realistic training environments and benchmarks for enterprise workflows, ensuring reliable evaluation methods.
  • Conduct rigorous experiments to deeply analyze variance, contamination, and distribution shifts.
  • Collaborate with researchers and engineers to implement validated methods into enterprise systems.

Benefits

  • Health plans, including flexible spending accounts.
  • 401(k) Plan with company match.
  • Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP).
  • Matching donations program.
  • Flexible time away plan.
  • Family leave programs.
Full Job Description
Job Description

Our Core AI Research team develops novel methods for enterprise agents that reason over multimodal information, use tools, take reliable action across stateful workflows, and improve through feedback. We work across LLM model post-training, agent harnesses, training environments, evaluations, ML, search and reasoning systems, partnering closely with product, engineering, infrastructure, security, and domain experts.

About the role

As a Staff Research Scientist, you will independently lead a major workstream in agent learning and recursive self-improvement. You will turn systematic failures and successful trajectories into hypotheses, experiments, training signals, and deployable improvements to model weights and/or the executable harness around the model.

This is a research role for someone who can move between scientific reasoning, training code, agent systems, and production constraints.

What you get to do in this role:
  • Design and execute end-to-end research projects that improve long-horizon enterprise agents across planning, reasoning, memory, tool use, retrieval, computer use, multi-agent coordination, and verification.
  • Research model post-training methods such as continued pretraining, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), RL, DPO/GRPO, reward modeling, and distillation.
  • Research harness-level optimization across prompts and task framing, tool and schema design, skills, MCP-backed providers, subagents, context and memory management, agent-loop policy, and reliable verifiers.
  • Build improvement flywheels that mine trajectories and production-safe signals, identify recurring failure modes, generate or curate data, propose interventions, and measure generalization before promotion.
  • Create realistic, stateful training environments and benchmarks for enterprise workflows, with programmatic verifiers and calibrated human or model-based graders where deterministic grading is not possible.
  • Run rigorous ablations and scaling experiments; reason explicitly about variance, contamination, reward hacking, distribution shift, cross-model transfer, cost, and latency.
  • Develop capabilities across one or more modalities - language, documents, images/video, and speech/audio - and across multilingual or cross-lingual settings.
  • Build reproducible distributed pipelines for training, rollout generation, evaluation, and inference; profile and resolve bottlenecks that only appear at scale.
  • Partner with other researchers, engineering, and product teams to move validated methods into reliable enterprise systems.
  • Communicate results through research reviews, technical reports, publications, patents, open-source contributions, and decision-ready recommendations


Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:
  • Experience in leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving. This may include using AI-powered tools, automating workflows, analyzing AI-driven insights, or exploring AI's potential impact on the function or industry.
  • 7+ years of relevant ML/AI research or engineering experience, or equivalent evidence of research depth and impact. A PhD or other advanced degree is required.
  • A track record of independently taking ambiguous research questions from hypothesis through implementation, experiment, analysis, and measurable outcome.
  • Strong foundations in machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning and/or probabilistic/statistical experimentation, with hands-on experience training or adapting large language models or multi-modal models.
  • Advanced Python and PyTorch skills, including the ability to modify training loops, model code, data pipelines, evaluators, or research infrastructure.
  • Practical depth in agentic AI: tool use, environments, planning/reasoning, memory/context, retrieval, long-horizon execution, or multi-agent systems.
  • Experience designing decision-useful evaluations, including strong dataset partitions, trajectory analysis, graders/verifiers, error taxonomies, and robust conclusions under noisy measurements.
  • Experience with distributed training, rollout, and/or inference using some subset of PyTorch distributed/FSDP, DeepSpeed or Megatron; verl, TRL, OpenRLHF or comparable post-training systems; and vLLM, SGLang, or comparable inference stacks.
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to build reliable, testable, reproducible systems in collaboration with AI/ML infra and software engineers.
  • Publications at top-tier venues (ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, AAAI).

Preferred qualifications:
  • Research and production experience in multimodal, document AI, computer vision, speech/audio, multilingual, or cross-lingual modeling.
  • Experience with enterprise agents, stateful workflows, browser/computer use, MCP or similar tool protocols, simulation environments.
  • Experience with synthetic data, model-generated feedback, proposer/critic/verifier systems, automated experimentation, or evolutionary/search-based optimization.
  • Experience operating GPU clusters and experiment platforms using Ray, Kubernetes, Slurm, cloud accelerators, or comparable systems.
  • Evidence of research impact through shipped capabilities, high-quality publications, patents, benchmarks, or substantive open-source contributions.

What success looks like :
  • You establish a reproducible improvement loop for at least one important enterprise agent capability and show gains on new tasks.
  • You turn at least one validated research result into a production or shared-platform improvement with clear quality, reliability, cost, and safety evidence.
  • You make the team's experiments faster and conclusions more trustworthy through reusable environments, evaluation infrastructure, or research methodology.

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $202,500 - $354,400, 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.

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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