Principal Software Engineer (Application Lifecycle)

• ServiceNow’s Application Lifecycle Engineering organization builds the platforms and tools that enable customers and developers to create, validate, deploy, and maintain applications at enterprise scale
• The team owns critical developer platform capabilities that improve developer productivity, application quality, and software delivery efficiency across the ServiceNow ecosystem. Our products support automated testing, application lifecycle management, CI/CD integration, developer tooling, and emerging AI-powered capabilities that help customers build software faster and more confidently
• As we continue investing in AI-native development experiences, we’re focused on reimagining how developers build, test, validate, and operate applications through intelligent automation, agentic systems, and modern platform engineering practices
• As a Principal Software Engineer, you’ll help define the technical strategy and architecture for the next generation of developer platforms and AI-powered engineering productivity solutions
• Lead architecture and technical direction across developer tooling, automated testing, and application lifecycle management platforms
• Design and build highly scalable platform services that improve developer productivity and software quality for enterprise customers
• Create prototypes, proof-of-concepts, and reference architectures to validate new technical approaches before broader adoption
• Drive innovation around AI-enabled developer experiences, intelligent automation, agentic workflows, and software delivery acceleration
• Partner closely with Product Management, Design, and Engineering leaders to translate strategic vision into technical execution
• Evaluate emerging technologies and identify opportunities to enhance platform capabilities, developer experience, and customer outcomes
• Influence architectural decisions across multiple engineering teams and help establish engineering standards and best practices
• Solve complex challenges related to scalability, reliability, observability, security, and performance across customer-facing platforms
• Mentor senior engineers and provide technical leadership through influence, collaboration, and technical excellence
• Contribute to long-term platform evolution while balancing customer impact and execution velocity

Benefits

• Generous family leave
• Matched donations
• Annual learning stipends
• Flexible PTO
• Competitive retirement plan
• Paid volunteer time

• 15+ years of software engineering experience or equivalent practical experience
• Strong experience designing customer-facing platform capabilities, developer tools, or engineering productivity solutions
• Expert-level understanding of system architecture, scalability, reliability, observability, fault tolerance, and production operations
• Deep expertise building large-scale distributed systems, developer platforms, cloud-native applications, or enterprise SaaS products
• Experience leading complex technical initiatives through collaboration rather than formal authority
• Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively across Engineering, Product Management, and Design organizations
• Strong software development background with Java and modern distributed system design
• Track record of mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across an organization
• Proven ability to drive technical strategy and influence architecture across multiple teams and organizations
• Experience building developer tools, testing platforms, CI/CD systems, developer experience (DevEx) solutions, or application lifecycle management products
• Experience with automated testing frameworks, testability platforms, or software quality engineering at scale
• Experience developing AI-powered products, AI-assisted developer workflows, agentic systems, or intelligent automation capabilities
• Knowledge of software development lifecycle tooling, deployment automation, and platform engineering practices
• Familiarity with developer productivity metrics, platform adoption strategies, and customer-centric platform development
• Experience building products used by software developers, administrators, or highly technical enterprise customers