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.

Senior Director, Technical Architecture 

Overview

The Senior Director, Technical Architecture serves as a senior technical leader and innovation catalyst within the Enterprise Architecture, Integrations and Services (EAI) organization.

This is a technically diverse role requiring "handson" technical/engineering experience and skills and an evolved leadership profile to influence the adoption and use of architectures. 

We are seeking a technical engineering leader from a very large-scaling environment who has led a team of advanced architects and driven multiple visionary technical architectures from research to POC to solution reference archictures to implementations in multiple enterprise scenarios.

This role reports directly to the VP of EAI and partners closely with Integrations, Services, Enterprise Architecture (EA), Engineering, Solution Architecture, and Product teams to define and evolve ServiceNow’s Enterprise Reference Architectures, advance the company's cloud‑native and AI‑first strategy, and guide the introduction and adoption of new and emerging technologies across the Digital Technology landscape.

This leader drives architectural integrity, accelerates innovation, and scales best‑in‑class patterns across the enterprise while ensuring consistent, secure, and scalable cloud architectures.

Key Responsibilities

Architectural Leadership & Strategy

· Define, evolve, and maintain enterprise-wide Reference Architectures, cloud architectures, and design patterns.

· Drive technology strategy aligned to long‑term business and platform goals, with a strong focus on cloud modernization and optimization.

· Lead evaluation, validation, and adoption of new and emerging technologies, including AI/LLM-based capabilities.

· Champion architectural governance to ensure solutions adhere to standards, patterns, cloud guardrails, and best practices.

Cross‑Functional Collaboration

· Partner closely with the Enterprise Architecture (EA) organization, ensuring alignment on enterprise-wide architectural direction and strategy.

· Collaborate with Solution Architects, driving consistency and reuse across solution designs and delivery.

· Work deeply with the Services Engineering team to ensure architectural integrity across services, accelerators, and delivery tooling.

· Partner with Integration teams to drive modern, scalable, secure integration patterns and ensure seamless interoperability across platforms.

· Engage with Engineering, Product, Integrations, and Services leaders to ensure architectural coherence, quality, and strategic alignment.

· Represent the organization in cross‑functional forums, providing cloud, platform, and AI technical thought leadership.

Innovation & Proofs of Concept (PoCs)

· Lead, design, and execute Proofs of Concept, technology spikes, and feasibility assessments in cloud, integration, platform, and AI/LLM domains.

· Introduce innovative architectural capabilities that enhance scalability, reliability, developer experience, and AI readiness.

Platform, Cloud & Systems Architecture

· Oversee architecture for distributed systems, integrations, cloud-native platforms, and enterprise-grade capabilities.

· Ensure architecture decisions support performance, scalability, resilience, security, and cost efficiency.

· Guide adoption of modern cloud architectures, microservices, API-driven ecosystems, event-driven patterns, and platform‑scale ServiceNow capabilities.

Governance & Standards

· Establish and enforce architectural standards, cloud guardrails, patterns, and best practices across engineering teams.

· Drive alignment across teams to reduce fragmentation, duplication, and technical debt.

· Provide architectural oversight on major initiatives to ensure cloud and platform solution integrity.

Mentorship & Leadership

· Lead and manage a high-performing team of 8–10 Senior Technical Architects, fostering a culture of excellence, accountability, and innovation.

· Mentor senior architects, staff architects, and technical leaders.

· Elevate architectural and cloud engineering maturity across the organization.

· Influence and inspire engineering and product teams through a principled, data‑driven architectural approach.

Qualifications

• 18+ years of progressive experience in enterprise technical architecture with a focus on System Design and Innovation.
• Hands‑on experience designing distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, integrations, and platform‑scale systems.
• Deep knowledge of AI/ML/LLM architectures, Agentic AI frameworks, and vector data strategies.
• Experience in modern integration patterns, and AI platform engineering.
• Significant experience defining Reference Architectures, reusable cloud patterns, and enterprise-scale guardrails.
• Minimum 10+ years of cross‑functional leadership influencing engineering, architecture, and product teams.
• Expertise across cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), integration patterns, microservices, API-driven ecosystems, data flows, observability, telemetry, and ServiceNow platform architecture.
• Experience within large‑scale, multi‑tenant enterprise environments.
• Deep knowledge of ServiceNow platforms, enterprise workflows, and platform engineering.
• Prior leadership of enterprise cloud transformation or cloud modernization initiatives.
• Experience with high-throughput data flows, telemetry, and real-time data processing
• Demonstrated success in modernization, cloud transformations, or platform rationalization programs.
• Proven ability to lead through ambiguity and drive enterprise‑wide architectural convergence.
• Strong communication and executive‑level presentation skills.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

Success Indicators

· Increased architectural consistency and reduction in duplicate or fragmented solutions.

· Faster adoption of cloud and platform capabilities through reusable architectural frameworks.

· Successful introduction of AI/LLM technologies to improve performance, cost, or developer efficiency.

· Strong cross‑organizational alignment and trust in architectural and cloud direction.

· Uplift in architectural and cloud engineering talent maturity across teams.

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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