ServiceNow
Senior Staff Software Engineer
San Diego, California, United States · Staff+ · Contract
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$19,793 more — $191,693 — moves this role to Level IV and 4 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $191,693 would place this position at wage Level IV. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Green-card filing pattern in this occupation
Green-card follow-through: 90%
Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- It all started when engineer Fred Luddy wrote code that automated a tedious task for his coworker, Phyllis.
- 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.
Responsibilities
- Coordinate across the multiple teams contributing to Build Agent to arbitrate quality standards and drive eval findings to committed, owned fixes - not just reports.
- Direct experience building or leading evaluation systems for LLM-based products - scoring methodology, benchmark design, and failure analysis, not just prompt engineering.
Requirements
- 6+ years of experience with technologies relevant to ServiceNow, including advanced coding skills and fluency in one or more of Java, C++, Ruby, Shell, or JavaScript.
Skills
- She cried tears of joy.
- Today, ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention.
- Join us to put AI to work for people.
- Key areas of focus include:
- Evaluation Infrastructure:
- Model Support & Benchmarking:
- Token usage, cache efficiency, and inference cost tracked alongside correctness as first-class release signals.
Compensation
- $172k-$301k
Company info
- Build Agent is ServiceNow's AI coding assistant, purpose-built for the platform's metadata-driven substrate - operating natively across ServiceNow's scoped applications, tables, and metadata types.
- This role leads the team responsible for the Build Agent evaluation framework, model support, and telemetry.
- The framework is critical to Build Agent success - it's already driven measurable wins: recovering Build Agent correctness, cutting latency and inference cost ahead of a major release, and catching high-severity defects that manual testing missed before they reached production.
- The team is 8 engineers and is currently the bottleneck on its own scale - this role exists to convert a high-performing initiative into a durable, scalable function.
- Evaluation Infrastructure: Golden prompt sets, Pass@1 and functional scoring, failure categorization (plumbing vs. metadata-creation failures), and coverage across ServiceNow metadata types and UI workflows.
- Model Support & Benchmarking: Structured evaluation of candidate foundation models against the production default, with failure-consistency analysis to separate scaffold/tuning issues from genuine capability gaps.
- Telemetry: Token usage, cache efficiency, and inference cost tracked alongside correctness as first-class release signals.
- Cross-Team Arbitration: Prioritizing eval coverage, defining what "good" means across surfaces owned by different contributing teams, and turning eval signal into committed fixes by the owning teams rather than open-ended findings.
- What you get to do in this role
- Own eval strategy and roadmap: prompt set design, scoring methodology, failure-mode taxonomy, and telemetry instrumentation.
- Lead model benchmarking efforts, making data-backed recommendations on model support decisions (e.g., evaluating frontier coding models against the incumbent default).
- Solve ambiguous, cross-cutting problems where eval signal, model capability, and platform architecture intersect - and where "correct" isn't obvious until you've defined the bar.
- Understanding of coding agent architecture: tool use, agentic loops, context management, and the trade-offs between generic and domain-specific scaffolding.
- Experience critically evaluating foundation models - distinguishing real capability differences from tuning or scaffold artifacts.
- Ability to execute against ambiguous priorities, weighing context, risk, and desired outcomes - particularly where eval data is incomplete or contested.
- For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $171,900 - $300,800, 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.
- Compensation is based on the geographic location in which the role is located and is subject to change based on work location.
- 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.
Equal opportunity
- ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer.
- All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or any other category protected by law.
- In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements.
- Accommodations
Visa & Work Authorization
- Export Control Regulations
This listing is sourced directly from ServiceNow's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.