Director, Forward Deployed Software Engineer – Applied AI FDE

About the position

ServiceNow’s Applied AI Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team is where bold ideas meet transformative action. We partner with our most strategic customers to shape the future of enterprise AI. Together, we identify high-value opportunities, accelerate business outcomes, and build reusable AI-native solutions that advance the Now Platform. Our mission: We embed deeply with customers to build intelligent, scalable AI solutions for their most critical business challenges. By solving complex real-world problems at speed, we codify repeatable patterns that scale across the enterprise—influencing both customer success and the future of the platform.

Responsibilities

• Lead high-performing engineering teams embedded with customers to deliver production-ready GenAI solutions.
• Provide technical direction, unblock delivery challenges, and ensure architectural integrity across the full stack.
• Guide engineering teams in developing LLM-enabled applications that span backend logic, data orchestration, and front-end UI.
• Oversee customer-embedded engagements, enabling teams to adapt, deploy, and iterate solutions in live environments.
• Direct the creation of reusable libraries, prompt scaffolds, and modular components.
• Channel field insights into platform and product teams, influencing roadmap priorities and improving tooling.
• Ensure teams deliver complete builds—from architecture to production-ready deployment—within agile sprint cycles.
• Mentor engineers across the stack—APIs, orchestration pipelines, vector databases, LLM frameworks, and UI components.
• Lead the development of scaffolds, SDKs, and documentation that enable repeatable success across customer engagements.
• Translate field-tested insights into actionable feedback for product and platform teams.

Requirements

• 13+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years in customer-facing or embedded roles.
• Proven ability to design and implement AI-native software in production-ready environments.
• Strength in backend (Python, Node.js, Java), frontend (React, Angular), APIs (REST/GraphQL).
• Familiarity with LangChain, Semantic Kernel, prompt chaining, vector search, and context management.
• Skilled in debugging distributed systems, tuning for latency, and implementing monitoring.
• Experience deploying in AWS, Azure, or GCP with CI/CD, containers, and infra-as-code.
• Able to travel up to 30% to embed onsite and deliver where it matters.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience integrating AI into SaaS platforms like ServiceNow or Salesforce.
• Track record of production-ready deployments in secure, regulated enterprise environments.
• Contributions to dev experience tooling, frameworks, or reusable AI scaffolds.

Benefits

• Base pay of $236,000 - $413,000, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation.
• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts.
• 401(k) Plan with company match.
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP).
• Matching donations.
• Flexible time away plan and family leave programs.