Director, Software Engineering Management

As a Director of Engineering, you will lead the teams that architect and build assistive and autonomous AI-native products to usher customers (IT departments using our IT service and operations management applications) into an agentic-first era. The work will span large-scale distributed systems, data ingestion, context creation and utilization, agentic harnesses, cost optimization, and agentic feedback loops to ensure value realization for our customers.

This role requires people leadership, thought leadership, deep technical expertise, strong architectural judgment, and a keen understanding of the scientific method to ship and refine real product through iterative experimentation. You will be accountable for the growth, health, and delivery outcomes of your teams.

Responsibilities include:

• Lead and grow the engineering teams responsible for assigned problem areas within ITSM/ITOM products, working with product and engineering leaders to understand blockers and opportunities around AI-native evolution and value realization.
• Own technical strategy and delivery for your teams. Set architectural direction, hold the bar on quality and reliability, and stay close enough to the work to validate hypotheses through evidence, not theory.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineers, tech leads, and managers. Build inclusive, high-performing teams with clear career paths and durable ownership.
• Drive evidence-based decision-making: formulate hypotheses, run experiments, measure outcomes, and use data to guide architectural decisions and product direction.
• Lead the evolution of current solutions toward AI-native capabilities-identifying where agentic patterns, data utilization, or autonomous workflows can unlock customer value-and translate those recommendations into staffed, executable work.
• Identify and address value realization gaps in agentic products that exist but aren’t delivering expected outcomes. Diagnose root causes (architecture, UX, data quality, feedback loops, cost) and direct targeted improvements.
• Establish architecture patterns, engineering standards, and operating rhythms specific to your problem domain. Document tradeoffs, rationale, and implementation guidance to help teams move faster and make consistent decisions.
• Collaborate across ITSM/ITOM engineering teams to share learnings, validate approaches, and accelerate adoption of patterns that work.
• Collaborate with stakeholders across Product, Design, Security, Operations, Sales, and Customer Success - aligning on roadmap and release readiness, meeting security and compliance requirements, and feeding field and customer signal back into engineering priorities., 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 (https://careers.servicenow.com/life-at-servicenow#workpersonas) . 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., 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.

• 15+ years of related engineering experience, including 5+ years leading and managing engineering teams (including managers or team leads), or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, enterprise platforms, workflow systems, data-intensive products, integration frameworks, or cloud-scale infrastructure.
• Deep understanding of system design for scale, reliability, observability, fault tolerance, data quality, security, and production readiness.
• Strong technical depth in Java, Python, or similar programming languages.
• Proven ability to define technical direction, influence architecture across teams, and translate ambiguous product strategy into executable engineering plans.
• Demonstrated success hiring, developing, and retaining engineers and engineering leaders, and managing performance, career growth, and team health.
• Ability to lead through formal authority and technical credibility alike, building alignment across peer engineering, Product, Design, Security, Operations, Sales, and Customer Success organizations.
• Strong judgment in balancing long-term architecture with pragmatic execution, customer impact, engineering velocity, and business priorities.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers, raising engineering standards, and building reusable patterns that create leverage across teams.
• Experience with AI-powered products, automation platforms, AI-assisted workflows, or agentic systems is strongly preferred.
• Ability to reason about AI-assisted enterprise workflows, including data quality, workflow correctness, evaluation, observability, safety controls, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Experience with enterprise service management, IT operations, CMDB, discovery, service mapping, AIOps, observability, workflow automation, endpoint management, or operational intelligence is a strong plus.
• Experience working with large-scale enterprise customers, production systems, and complex migration or modernization efforts is a plus.

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $221,200 - $387,100 , 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.

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.

The engineering organization is a dynamic group of builders, thinkers, and problem-solvers focused on delivering scalable, AI-powered software products that improve how organizations work. We value clean architecture, intuitive experiences, operational excellence, and a culture of continuous improvement. Every engineer plays an important role in shaping the quality, reliability, and long-term success of our products.

About the Team

The Service Operations Business Unit brings together IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), and CMDB capabilities on the ServiceNow Platform. This product engineering organization builds the software that helps customers deliver resilient, intelligent, and efficient enterprise services.

The Service Operations product portfolio connects incident, request, fulfillment, infrastructure visibility, service mapping, trusted configuration data, automation, and AIOps into a unified operating model. By combining service delivery with operational intelligence and trusted operational context, these products help customers move toward proactive, AI-assisted, and increasingly self-healing operations at enterprise scale.

Together, these capabilities help customers modernize how they deliver and operate services, improve reliability, reduce manual effort, and drive measurable productivity outcomes on a single platform., * Shape the AI-native future of the Service Operations Business Unit product portfolio on the ServiceNow Platform.

• Build and lead the teams delivering foundational product and platform capabilities that help enterprises deliver, operate, automate, and continuously improve services at scale.
• Define how AI agents, automation, operational data, and human workflows come together to create safer, more reliable, and more productive enterprise operations.
• Collaborate with teams that value craftsmanship, quality, innovation, accountability, and meaningful customer impact.