ServiceNow Systems Architect

Job Description
Position Summary:
The ServiceNow Platform Architect is the principal technical authority for the organization's ServiceNow platform. This role is responsible for defining the enterprise platform architecture, establishing technical standards and guardrails, governing solution design, and ensuring the platform remains scalable, secure, resilient, supportable, and aligned with business and technology strategy.
The ServiceNow Platform Architect partners with enterprise architects, product and process owners, engineering teams, cybersecurity, infrastructure, data, integration, and business leaders to guide the evolution of ServiceNow as an enterprise platform.
The role provides architectural leadership across all ServiceNow products and capabilities, including shared platform services, data architecture, integrations, security, automation, user experience, artificial intelligence, and custom application development. The architect is expected to balance business speed with long-term platform sustainability, reducing unnecessary customization and technical debt while enabling innovation and measurable business value.
Key Responsibilities:
Enterprise Platform Architecture and Strategy

• Define, maintain, and communicate the target-state architecture for the enterprise ServiceNow platform.

• Develop and govern a multiyear technical roadmap aligned with the ServiceNow product roadmap, enterprise architecture strategy, and business priorities.

• Establish architectural principles, standards, reference architectures, reusable patterns, and technical guardrails.

• Ensure ServiceNow is positioned and managed as an enterprise platform rather than a collection of isolated applications.

• Evaluate strategic platform decisions involving new products, major capabilities, acquisitions, consolidation, instance strategy, and enterprise integrations.

• Assess emerging ServiceNow capabilities, including artificial intelligence, automation, workflow orchestration, low-code development, and platform analytics.

• Advise executive and senior technology leaders on platform opportunities, risks, investments, and architectural tradeoffs.

• Ensure architectural decisions support global scalability, localization, accessibility, regulatory requirements, and organizational growth.

Architecture Governance and Decision Authority

• Serve as the senior technical decision-maker for ServiceNow architecture and engineering standards.

• Lead or chair ServiceNow architecture review boards, steering committee, and technical governance forums.

• Review and approve high-impact solution designs, platform extensions, integrations, data-model changes, and custom applications.

• Establish clear architectural decision rights, exception processes, and escalation paths.

• Maintain architecture decision records and ensure significant platform decisions are documented, traceable, and communicated.

• Identify designs that introduce platform risk, duplication, unnecessary customization, or long-term support concerns.

• Provide final architectural recommendations when delivery teams, vendors, product owners, or business stakeholders propose competing technical approaches.

• Ensure technical governance enables delivery rather than creating unnecessary administrative barriers.

Enterprise Solution Architecture

• Translate complex business strategies and cross-functional requirements into cohesive ServiceNow platform architectures.

• Provide architectural leadership for enterprise-wide programs spanning multiple ServiceNow products, business units, regions, and technical domains.

• Determine the appropriate use of native configuration, low-code capabilities, custom development, external services, and integrations.

• Ensure solutions reuse shared platform capabilities and avoid fragmented or duplicative implementations.

• Define reference architectures for common enterprise patterns such as case management, request fulfillment, approvals, employee workflows, customer workflows, risk processes, and operational automation.

• Ensure platform solutions meet nonfunctional requirements for performance, resilience, availability, supportability, usability, maintainability, and upgradeability.

• Lead architecture discovery and design activities during major transformations, implementations, mergers, acquisitions, and platform consolidations.

• Partner with solution architects and technical leads to ensure detailed designs conform to enterprise architecture.

Platform Engineering Standards

• Define engineering standards for ServiceNow development, configuration, testing, deployment, documentation, and support.

• Establish appropriate use patterns for Flow Designer, IntegrationHub, Business Rules, Script Includes, UI Builder, Service Portal, Workspace, App Engine, scoped applications, APIs, and platform automation.

• Define standards for custom tables, Task extensions, fields, application scopes, roles, groups, ACLs, notifications, events, and scheduled processing.

• Guide the creation of reusable platform services, shared components, templates, utilities, and integration patterns.

• Ensure custom development is justified, documented, testable, secure, and maintainable.

• Establish code-review and technical-quality expectations for internal teams and implementation partners.

• Promote automated testing, source control, CI/CD, release automation, and repeatable deployment practices.

• Provide architectural direction for complex performance, reliability, scalability, and maintainability issues.

Integration and Enterprise Ecosystem Architecture

• Define the enterprise integration architecture for ServiceNow and connected systems.

• Establish standards for REST and SOAP APIs, IntegrationHub, MID Servers, spokes, webhooks, messaging, file-based integrations, and event-driven patterns.

• Determine when integration logic should reside within ServiceNow, an enterprise integration platform, or another system.

• Define requirements for authentication, authorization, encryption, observability, retry handling, reconciliation, error management, and operational ownership.

• Partner with identity, cloud, infrastructure, data, security, and enterprise integration teams.

• Ensure integrations are loosely coupled, supportable, monitored, and aligned with enterprise standards.

• Reduce point-to-point integration sprawl through reusable services and governed integration patterns.

• Maintain awareness of upstream and downstream architectural dependencies that could affect platform availability or data integrity.

Data, CMDB, and CSDM Architecture

• Define and govern the enterprise ServiceNow data architecture.

• Establish or assist in standards for data ownership, classification, quality, lineage, retention, archival, synchronization, and access.

• Provide architectural leadership for the Configuration Management Database and Common Service Data Model.

• Ensure CMDB, asset, service, application, infrastructure, organizational, and operational data models are coherent and appropriately governed.

• Guide the design of custom data models and relationships while preventing unnecessary duplication of platform data.

• Partner with ITOM, Asset Management, Discovery, Service Mapping, infrastructure, application, and data-governance teams.

• Establish architectural expectations for data migration, import sets, transform maps, integrations, reconciliation, and certification.

• Ensure reporting and analytics requirements are supported by reliable, governed, and appropriately structured data.

Security, Risk, and Compliance Architecture

• Define security architecture and technical controls for the ServiceNow platform.

• Establish standards for roles, groups, ACLs, delegated administration, authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets, and privileged access.

• Ensure appropriate separation of duties and protection of sensitive, regulated, confidential, and personally identifiable information.

• Partner with cybersecurity, privacy, legal, audit, risk, compliance, and identity-management teams.

• Evaluate security impacts of integrations, plugins, custom applications, external users, mobile access, artificial intelligence, and data-sharing arrangements.

• Ensure platform architecture supports applicable regulatory, privacy, records-management, and audit requirements.

• Guide remediation of security vulnerabilities, control gaps, and architectural risks.

• Participate in platform risk assessments and provide evidence supporting internal and external audits.

Platform Lifecycle, Reliability, and Technical Health

• Define the architectural approach for upgrades, patches, family releases, store applications, plugins, and major platform changes.

• Ensure the platform remains within supported versions and takes advantage of relevant product improvements.

• Reduce upgrade complexity by limiting unnecessary customization and enforcing maintainable design patterns.

• Establish architectural standards for instance strategy, environment usage, cloning, data masking, deployment, rollback, and release management.

• Define technical-health measures for performance, security, customization, integration reliability, technical debt, and upgrade readiness.

• Review health-scan findings and establish remediation priorities with engineering and product teams.

• Guide capacity planning, performance optimization, high availability, disaster recovery, business continuity, and operational resilience.

• Ensure architectural risks are visible, prioritized, funded, and actively managed.

Technical Leadership and Stakeholder Partnership

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to other architects, developers, administrators, engineers, analysts, and implementation partners.

• Act as a trusted advisor to the Platform Owner and senior technology leadership.

• Partner with product owners and process owners to balance business priorities with platform strategy and technical sustainability.

• Communicate complex architectural concepts clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences.

• Facilitate alignment among business teams, delivery teams, vendors, security, operations, and enterprise architecture.

• Challenge proposed solutions constructively and provide practical alternatives.

• Support vendor selection, statements of work, architectural assessments, and partner performance reviews.

• Ensure third-party implementation partners comply with organizational architecture and engineering standards.

• Contribute to workforce planning, technical capability development, and the definition of roles across the ServiceNow operating model.

Scope:
The Senior Enterprise ServiceNow Platform Architect may provide architecture oversight across capabilities such as:

• IT Service Management

• IT Operations Management

• Human Resources Service Delivery

• Strategic Portfolio Management

• Integrated Risk Management and Governance, Risk, and Compliance

• Software and Hardware Asset Management

• App Engine and custom applications

• Automation Engine and IntegrationHub

• Employee Center, Service Portal, Workspaces, and mobile experiences

• Performance Analytics, reporting, and platform data

• Virtual Agent, Now Assist, and other artificial intelligence capabilities

• CMDB, CSDM, Discovery, Service Mapping, and enterprise integrations

Required Education, Experience, & Skills
Required Qualifications

• Extensive experience architecting, implementing, and governing ServiceNow in a large enterprise environment.

• Demonstrated experience serving as a platform architect, enterprise architect, technical architect, or equivalent senior technical leader.

• Deep knowledge of ServiceNow platform architecture, application development, integration, security, data modeling, automation, and administration.

• Experience architecting solutions across multiple ServiceNow product families.

• Proven ability to define enterprise standards, reference architectures, guardrails, and governance processes.

• Strong understanding of configuration-first, low-code, and custom-development design considerations.

• Experience with enterprise integration patterns, APIs, IntegrationHub, MID Servers, authentication, and identity management.

• Strong understanding of CMDB, CSDM, service modeling, data governance, and configuration-management principles.

• Experience addressing performance, scalability, security, resilience, upgradeability, and technical debt.

• Ability to lead architecture decisions involving multiple teams, business units, vendors, and senior stakeholders.

• Strong written, verbal, facilitation, and executive communication skills.

• Ability to influence outcomes without relying solely on direct organizational authority.

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Education, Experience, & Skills
Preferred Qualifications

• ServiceNow Certified System Administrator.

• ServiceNow Certified Application Developer.

• One or more ServiceNow Certified Implementation Specialist certifications.

• ServiceNow Certified Technical Architect or Certified Master Architect.

• Experience operating ServiceNow in a global, highly regulated, complex, or federated enterprise.

• Experience operating a GCC (Government Cloud Community) High ServiceNow instance

• Experience with manufacturing, government, defense, or another regulated industry.

• Knowledge of enterprise architecture frameworks and architecture-review practices.

• Experience with cloud architecture, DevOps, CI/CD, identity and access management, data architecture, and cybersecurity.

• Experience leading platform consolidation, enterprise transformation, mergers and acquisitions, or major ServiceNow modernization programs.

• Master's degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Pay Information
Full-Time Salary Range: $122400 - $208080
Please note: This range is based on our market pay structures. However, individual salaries are determined by a variety of factors including, but not limited to: business considerations, local market conditions, and internal equity, as well as candidate qualifications, such as skills, education, and experience.
Employee Benefits: At BAE Systems, we support our employees in all aspects of their life, including their health and financial well-being. Regular employees scheduled to work 20+ hours per week are offered: health, dental, and vision insurance; health savings accounts; a 401(k) savings plan; disability coverage; and life and accident insurance. We also have an employee assistance program, a legal plan, and other perks including discounts on things like home, auto, and pet insurance. Our leave programs include paid time off, paid holidays, as well as other types of leave, including paid parental, military, bereavement, and any applicable federal and state sick leave. Employees may participate in the company recognition program to receive monetary or non-monetary recognition awards. Other incentives may be available based on position level and/or job specifics.
About BAE Systems, Inc.
BAE Systems, Inc. is a defense, aerospace, and security company headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, with more than 40,000 employees worldwide. We serve, supply, and protect those who protect us. As one of the most geographically diverse international defense companies, we deliver a full range of products and services spanning air, land, maritime, space, and cyber, including advanced electronics, intelligence solutions, and dedicated customer support.
Our culture is performance-driven and values-led, built on curiosity, creativity, and collaboration. Purpose isn't a tagline here. It's what drives us. We're developing breakthrough technologies that defend national security and make a lasting impact on our communities and our planet. When you join BAE Systems, you're not just building a career. You're contributing to a mission that truly matters.
This position will be posted for at least 5 calendar days. The posting will remain active until the position is filled, or a qualified pool of candidates is identified.