Principal Platform Architect

Job description

About The Role

The Principal Platform Architect is a trusted advisor for enterprise platform strategy and governance. You define platform standards and guide technical decisions to ensure ServiceNow remains healthy, scalable, and aligned to customer goals. Your purpose is to establish governance models, anticipate risks, and enable sustainable growth. You engage across CxO, enterprise architects, and platform teams to influence decisions and ensure consistency across the program.

What You Will Do

Define and maintain platform vision and strategy aligned to enterprise IT and business objectives. Establish platform health metrics and remediation strategies to manage technical debt, platform hygiene, upgrade readiness, and long-term maintainability. Define reusable architecture patterns, standards, and reference architectures that accelerate delivery and reduce implementation risk. Provide architectural guidance to ensure designs align with platform standards and leading practices.

Partner with customer executives to ensure platform decisions support measurable business outcomes, adoption objectives, and value realisation. Shape governance frameworks covering instance strategy, integrations, and data models. Facilitate platform governance forums to drive consistent decisions across partners and teams. Anticipate and mitigate platform risks (scalability, performance, technical debt). Influence adoption of leading practices across customer, partner, and ServiceNow teams.

Provide structured feedback to ServiceNow product and engineering teams.

What Success Looks Like

Platform operating model adopted and actively governing demand, releases, and technical standards. Reduction in technical debt and improvement in platform health metrics. Consistent architecture decisions across all implementation partners. Increased adoption of strategic platform capabilities, including AI and automation. Demonstrable alignment between platform roadmap and business outcomes. ServiceNow is embedded as a strategic enterprise platform with clear governance models in place.

Platform standards are consistently applied across all delivery teams. Technical risks are reduced, and scalability is maintained. You are recognised as a trusted advisor on platform strategy and governance, complementing the CSE’s business-value leadership.

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have: Experience in leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving. This may include using AI-powered tools, automating workflows, analyzing AI-driven insights, or exploring AI's potential impact on the function or industry. 12+ years of experience in enterprise architecture, solution strategy, and program leadership.

Proven experience engaging at Executive level to influence platform direction and business outcomes. Track record of defining multi-workflow, enterprise-scale architectures and governance models. Strong ability to operate as a program-level architect, guiding multiple teams and partners toward a unified vision. Expertise in platform strategy, integration patterns, and complex delivery governance. ServiceNow Certified Master Architect (CMA) plus other architecture and governance framework certifications are highly desirable.

Security requirements

Must hold, or eligible to obtain security clearance (baseline / NV1 / NV2)