Senior Staff, AI Search Architect

It all started in sunny San Diego, California in 2004 when a visionary engineer, Fred Luddy, saw the potential to transform how we work. Fast forward to today — ServiceNow stands as a global market leader, bringing innovative AI-enhanced technology to over 8,100 customers, including 85% of the Fortune 500®. Our intelligent cloud-based platform seamlessly connects people, systems, and processes to empower organizations to find smarter, faster, and better ways to work. But this is just the beginning of our journey. Join us as we pursue our purpose to make the world work better for everyone.

About the Role

ServiceNow is seeking an innovative and experienced Enterprise Search Architect to lead the next phase of AI powered search for our employee and customer-facing search capabilities. You will drive the design and implementation of scalable, intelligent, and high-performance search systems across our platform — focusing on relevance, accuracy, personalization, and AI-enhanced discovery.

You will bring expertise in modern search architecture, vector-based retrieval (e.g., RAG), traditional IR models, and enterprise search platforms. You'll collaborate with product, platform, and AI teams to push the boundaries of how users interact with and discover information in the Now Platform.

Why Join Us?

• Help shape the future of intelligent search experiences on one of the world’s leading digital workflow platforms.
• Collaborate with a world-class team of engineers, researchers, and product leaders.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and Architect Enterprise Search Systems for internal tools and customer-facing experiences, ensuring scalability, performance, and high availability.
• Own the relevance roadmap: continually improve precision, recall, and user satisfaction via tuning, personalization, and ranking strategies.
• Drive AI-powered search capabilities including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), embedding-based retrieval, semantic search, and hybrid techniques.
• Integrate structured and unstructured data sources across the enterprise for unified search.
• Partner with ML/NLP teams to develop and fine-tune search ranking algorithms, LLM-based query understanding, entity recognition, and document summarization.
• Lead adoption and evolution of ServiceNow AI Search features, including Search Configuration, Search Sources, and Vector Search modules.
• Create reusable search patterns, accelerators, and frameworks for faster onboarding of new applications or data domains.
• Evaluate and incorporate relevant enterprise search tools (e.g., Elasticsearch, Azure Cognitive Search, Vespa, OpenSearch, Pinecone, Weaviate).
• Guide best practices in multi-tenant indexing, search data governance, and real-time indexing pipelines.
• Collaborate with UI/UX teams to design engaging search experiences, including facets, typeahead, relevance feedback, and conversational interfaces.
• Monitor, measure, and optimize search KPIs — e.g., query success, abandonment rate, MRR (Mean Reciprocal Rank), and NDCG.

Emerging Technology Group

Emerging Technology Group (ETG) is ServiceNow’s Digital Technology (DT) internal incubation group.
Being customer zero for ServiceNow products, we ensure the products work for us internally and deliver value as they get in the hands of our customers. As Customer Zero, we implement all our technology workflows and deliver the best experience. With AI everywhere, we are in charge of AI Experiences that cut across the enterprise like Search, Conversational Interfaces, and Automation, and we help our DT developers be productive by building enterprise-grade products on the ServiceNow Platform. We are focused on accelerating innovations and developing new concepts, forward-thinking solutions, and products leveraging ServiceNow’s Intelligent platform and the best industry standards. If you enjoy learning, growing, and making an impact, you will love being in this role. You get exposure to every facet of the enterprise and can make a meaningful impact on both the business and the people who work here. You will face new obstacles and priorities every day, which can be invigorating and push the boundaries of your thought process.

About Digital Technology

We’re not yesterday’s IT department—we're Digital Technology. The world around us keeps changing and so do we. We’re redefining what it means to be IT with a mindset centered on transformation, experience, AI-driven automation, innovation, and growth. We’re all about delivering delightful, secure customer and employee experiences that accelerate ServiceNow’s journey to become the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century. And we love co-creating, using, and highlighting our own products to do it. Ultimately, we strive to make the world work better for our employees and customers—when you work in ServiceNow Digital Technology, you work for them.

• 15+ years of experience in search architecture, information retrieval, or AI/ML applied to enterprise or consumer search platforms.
• Deep understanding of search ranking techniques and semantic techniques (vector search, transformers, embeddings).
• Proven experience building RAG pipelines, with knowledge of different RAG variants (e.g., Fusion, Condenser, Retrieval with Memory Augmentation, Multi-hop RAG).
• Deep knowledge of AI/ML frameworks and search technologies (e.g., Moveworks, Glean, Elasticsearch, Coveo), particularly focused on data indexing, context awareness, and relevance ranking.
• Hands-on experience with search engines such as Elasticsearch, Apache Solr, Vespa, Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, Qdrant, etc.
• Proficiency in ServiceNow AI Search features and architecture — or demonstrable experience with similar platforms.
• Expertise in NLP, LLMs, embedding generation, and retrieval quality optimization.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, or JavaScript.
• Familiarity with data pipelines for indexing (e.g., Kafka, Airflow, Spark).
• Understanding of multi-lingual search, query expansion, relevance tuning, synonym management, and zero-result handling.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with LLM orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel) in production settings.
• Understanding of ServiceNow’s architecture, Common Service Data Model (CSDM), and Now Platform data constructs.
• Prior experience implementing search in enterprise ecosystems, such as ITSM, HR, Security, or Customer Support domains.
• Experience with vector database performance optimization (e.g., ANN algorithms like HNSW, IVF).
• Familiarity with observability and metrics for search quality.
• Contributions to open-source search projects

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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 Employer

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or nationality, ancestry, age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status, 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

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, please contact [email protected] for assistance. 

Export Control Regulations

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. 

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