Principal Software Engineer - Application Lifecycle

About the Team
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.
What You'll Do
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.
Required
15+ years of software engineering experience or equivalent practical experience.
Deep expertise building large-scale distributed systems, developer platforms, cloud-native applications, or enterprise SaaS products.
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.
Strong software development background with Java and modern distributed system design.
Proven ability to drive technical strategy and influence architecture across multiple teams and organizations.
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.
Track record of mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across an organization.
Preferred
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.
Experience building products used by software developers, administrators, or highly technical enterprise customers.
Familiarity with developer productivity metrics, platform adoption strategies, and customer-centric platform development.
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.

Employment type
Full-time

Work arrangement
Hybrid