Principal ServiceNow engineer

Southern New Hampshire University is a team of innovators. World changers. Individuals who believe in progress with purpose. Since 1932, our people-centered strategy has defined us - and helped us grow a team that now serves over 180,000 learners worldwide.

Our mission to transform lives is made possible by talented people who bring diverse industry experience, backgrounds and skills to the university. And today, we're ready to expand our reach. All we need is you.

Make an impact - from near or far

At SNHU, you'll have the option to work remotely in the following states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

We ask that our remote employees have access to a reliable internet connection and a dedicated, properly equipped workspace that is free of distractions. Employees must reside in, and work from, one of the above approved states.

The opportunity

The Principal ServiceNow Engineer will report directly to the Senior Platform Manager - ServiceNow. You will play a critical role in the growth, stability, and modernization of SNHU's enterprise ServiceNow platform, ensuring the continued best practice of institutional practices it supports. You will be a senior technical leader who balances hands-on engineering with platform level strategy, ensuring that solutions are secure, scalable, reliable, and aligned with long-term platform health. As a steward of the platform, the Principal Engineer leads modernization projects, including technical debt reduction and deprecation replacements, guiding work from discovery through delivery to improve operability, upgrade readiness, and sustainability.

You will be a technical bridge between product owners, engineering teams, architects, and vendor partners, the Principal ServiceNow Engineer provides architectural leadership and sets engineering standards across the ServiceNow ecosystem. You will work with partners to deliver new capabilities while maintaining governance, consistency, and platform agreement. You will support any application installed on the platform as the footprint evolves. The Principal Engineer drives shared automation through mentorship, design guidance, and senior level escalation support. This support aligns integration and orchestration patterns, reduces manual operations, and enables secure, reliable outcomes. These outcomes connect platform capabilities to institutional goals and value.

You will work 100% remotely from any of our approved states. #LI-Remote

What You'll Do:

• Be a chief technical designer for ServiceNow architecture and solutions, responsible for overall code quality, maintainability, and platform understanding.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards (patterns, reusable components, security guardrails, logging/telemetry expectations, review practices).
• Provide design and architecture leadership across evolving products, integrations, and core platform capabilities, ensuring solutions scale and remain upgradable.
• Lead platform modernization programs end-to-end, including deprecation replacements and removal of legacy patterns/customizations.
• Document, manage, and govern customizations across the platform; customization risk, tradeoffs, and supportability impacts; and support steering partners in making informed decisions. Carry this forward into roadmap advisory, upgrade planning, and ongoing platform health work.
• Represent the business capabilities enabled by the platform and connect those capabilities to institutional goals, value, and strategy to guide prioritization and solution design.
• Provide architectural controls to ensure the correct technical solutions are used when delivering business outcomes, including reviewing developer designs and approaches, recommending platform-aligned patterns, and enforcing guardrails that keep solutions secure, scalable, and upgradeable.
• Proactively identify upcoming platform changes (deprecated APIs/features, new platform behaviors), assess impact, and create a sequenced remediation plan
• Own deprecations and migrations from inception to maintenance: introduce upcoming change to product owners, identify impacted groups, coordinate change management activities, update/run testing, ensure inclusion in upgrade preview, and validate post-release outcomes.
• Operate a platform health program: monitor, report, and improve platform health, performance, usage, and compliance using platform tooling and analytics.
• Ensure upgrades are predictable and low risk by maintaining remediation quality standards: regression strategy, upgrade preview readiness, automated test coverage, and mitigation planning.
• Provide advanced troubleshooting, bug fixes, and root cause analysis; guide preventative automation to reduce recurrence and operational toil.
• Evaluate and promote the value proposition of both adopted and latest ServiceNow products/capabilities, translating platform options into outcomes, tradeoffs, and investment recommendations.
• Partner with ServiceNow and other vendor/implementation partners to plan and execute discovery efforts (workshops, requirements discovery, solution shaping, and proof-of-concept validation), ensuring outcomes are actionable and aligned to SNHU standards, roadmap, and operability expectations.
• Document and maintain policies, procedures, and controls for operating the ServiceNow platform and its SDLC.
• Design, prototype, implement, test, and deploy technical solutions (business rules, client/server scripting, UI policies/actions/pages, scheduled jobs, import/transform, ACLs, notifications, flows as appropriate).
• Improve delivery reliability through repeatable automation, standardized release practices, and clear "definition of done" expectations (including testing and documentation).
• Design and support integrations (SSO, CMDB/data sources, SaaS connectors) and integrate legacy systems with ServiceNow using MID Server, APIs, web services, email, chat, and other relevant technologies.
• Support existing and custom applications within ServiceNow, including integration lifecycle ownership (monitoring, error handling, retry logic, and operational support).
• Partner with process owners to translate our needs into solutions while reducing variation, eliminating waste, and promoting platform-patterns.
• Mentor fellow technical resources and ecosystem partners; provide informal coaching and direction while raising overall engineering maturity.
• Advise on vendor/consulting work (technical direction, quality gates, acceptance criteria, and operational readiness).
• Be a senior escalation point for incident/ticket resolution and problem remediation and participate in on-call rotation as an escalation point.
• Use AI-assisted tooling responsibly to accelerate analysis, documentation, and development while observing SNHU's evolving guidance and maintaining rigorous security, privacy, and human review standards.
• Other responsibilities as assigned or required.

What We're Looking For:

• 10+ years' experience configuring the ServiceNow Platform in an enterprise environment.
• 7+ years of experience of ServiceNow development.
• Demonstrated experience leading platform modernization and cleanup programs (technical debt reduction, removal of legacy patterns, or large-scale refactors)
• Experience leading deprecation replacements/migrations end-to-end, including partner agreement, change management coordination, testing updates, rollout planning, and post-release validation.
• Experience supporting core ITSM processes: Incident, Problem, Change, Service Catalog/Request, CMDB, and Knowledge.
• Experience with Integration experience using ServiceNow APIs and common enterprise technologies (SSO/SAML, LDAP, REST/SOAP, JDBC/ODBC, SSL/TLS, file transfer patterns as applicable).
• Experience building and sustaining a platform health and technical debt reduction program (health scans, remediation backlog creation, prioritization, measurable improvements). Integration architecture skills, including error handling patterns, observability, and operational readiness for enterprise integrations.
• ITIL Foundation certification (or equivalent ITSM certification).
• ServiceNow Certified System Administrator (CSA).
• ServiceNow Certified Application Developer (CAD).
• ServiceNow Certified Implementation Specialist (CIS).
• ServiceNow Certified Technical Architect (CTA).

We believe real innovation comes from inclusion - where different experiences, perspectives and talents are celebrated. So if you're wondering whether SNHU is right for you, take the leap and apply. You might be just the person we're looking for.

Compensation

Exceptional benefits (because you're exceptional)

You're the whole package. Your benefits should be, too. As a full-time employee at SNHU, you'll get:

• High-quality, low-deductible medical insurance

• Low to no-cost dental and vision plans

• 5 weeks of paid time off (plus almost a dozen paid holidays)

• Employer-funded retirement

• Free tuition program

• Parental leave

• Mental health and wellbeing resources