Principal Design Technologist, Design Systems & Applied AI

Job Description

Team & Role

This role is part of our Product Design team, which turns a deep understanding of our users and customers into product experiences they love. Our designers bring expertise across design systems, visual design, interaction design, content design, and product design. At ServiceNow, design has an intentional seat at the table, and we partner with engineering and product management from the outset.

The Design Systems team creates the shared foundations that help ServiceNow teams deliver consistent, accessible, and high-quality product experiences. As Platform and the business units adopt AI-assisted ways of working, designers and front-end engineers need clear standards, practical examples, and reliable ways to check that those standards are being applied.

We're looking for a Principal Design Technologist to make design-system standards easier to understand, test, and implement. This role translates design-system standards and design files into clear specifications, design-owned coded reference components, validation tools, and implementation guidance. These resources show how an experience should look and behave before Engineering builds and maintains the production implementation.

Across Design, this principal individual contributor will use deep design and web-development expertise to create coded explorations that demonstrate the intended experience, behavior, and quality of components and AI-enabled interactions. They will mentor product designers who use code to explore and communicate experience concepts and contribute practical insight to the development and adoption of AI-assisted design tools. The role leads through expertise and influence. Product and Engineering retain ownership of product strategy, technical architecture, production code, roadmaps, and delivery.

What you get to do in this role:

• Work with Product Design, Product Management, and Engineering to set the direction for design-system tools and practices that improve quality and adoption across Platform and the business units.
• Create and maintain design-owned coded UI reference libraries based on design-system standards and source designs, including Figma where applicable. Use them to demonstrate component states, interactions, responsive behavior, accessibility expectations, and use of design tokens. Engineering owns the production of component libraries and their technical implementation.
• Evaluate and create AI-assisted tools that help teams find, apply, and check design-system guidance. Define practical ways to assess whether the tools are accurate, useful, understandable, and aligned with approved standards.
• Partner with front-end engineering teams to identify recurring differences between approved designs and delivered experiences. Create design-side review and validation methods that surface issues earlier, and use what teams learn during implementation to improve shared standards, reference components, and guidance.
• Lead the adoption of AI tools across Design by evaluating emerging tools, setting responsible working practices, and providing playbooks, demonstrations, workshops, and peer learning that help designers improve quality and work more efficiently.
• Mentor and connect product designers who use code to prototype AI experiences. Establish shared working practices, align their explorations with the design system, and turn useful lessons into reusable guidance for the broader design organization.
• Collaborate with Product Management and Engineering on the contribution process that enables experts across Design, Engineering, Product, Accessibility, Platform, and the business units to propose, review, and maintain design-system guidance and reference materials.
• Partner with Design Enablement and Engineering Operations to help front-end UI engineers use the design system effectively. Contribute design-system onboarding, training, implementation guidance, reference examples, and validation practices, while Engineering Operations leads engineering processes and adoption within the front-end community.

Qualifications

Preferred Qualifications:

• 12+ years of experience in product design, design systems, design technology, prototyping, or a related discipline within complex, enterprise-scale products.
• A portfolio or body of work demonstrating strong systems thinking, interaction and visual craft, and the ability to turn design standards into reusable guidance, reference components, and tools.
• Hands-on experience with modern UI frameworks such as Lit and Web Components, with the ability to build coded prototypes and design-owned reference components that clearly demonstrate intended appearance and behavior.
• Deep knowledge of design systems, including components, patterns, design tokens, themes, accessibility, responsive behavior, localization, governance, and contribution processes.
• Experience using AI to improve design work, such as helping teams find guidance, create and review design-system content, check quality, or automate repeatable tasks. Experience defining appropriate human review and responsible-use practices.
• Experience using or extending design tools such as Figma, documentation platforms, component catalogs, analytics, plugins, or automated design-quality and accessibility checks.
• Demonstrated success setting direction and influencing senior partners across Design, Product, Engineering, Accessibility, and AI in a complex, distributed organization.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, storytelling, critique, and mentoring skills, with a record of helping a broad design organization adopt AI tools, shared standards, and new ways of working.

Basic Qualifications:

• Experience contributing throughout the product development process for web or software products.
• Experience in user experience design, product design, design systems, design technology, prototyping, or related field.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams across Product, Design, Accessibility, and Engineering.

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.

Additional Information

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, 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

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