Job DescriptionAbout the Role
As a Principal Engineer (Level 19), you are a functional expert and advisory individual contributor responsible forworkacross multiple teams. You willestablishdesign principles, drive cross-team technical strategy with a time horizon of up to one year, and serve as the primary escalation point for complex engineering challenges in the AI Agentic Platform domain.Your work will directly shape how Nordstromleveragesautonomous AI to enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and accelerate engineering productivity.
A Day in the Life
- Architect and evolve the AI Agentic Platform defining the foundational layers for agent orchestration, tool use, memory, and multi-agent coordination at Nordstrom scale.
- Partner with AI/ML and product teams to translate business goals into platform capabilities that enable autonomous agent workflows across commerce, inventory, and customer experience domains.
- Lead cross-team design reviews,establishplatform engineering standards, and create reusable architecture artifacts that accelerate delivery across the organization.
- Apply deep AI fluency to evaluate and integrate LLM APIs, vector stores, RAG patterns, and emerging agentic frameworks (e.g.,LangGraph,AutoGen, OpenAI Assistants API, Semantic Kernel).
- Mentor and coach engineers acrossteams;serve as the technical escalation point for complex agentic system issues and significant operational incidents.
- Drive decisions on platform observability, evaluation, and guardrails ensuring agents behave reliably, safely, and within business policy constraints.
- Hands-on POC development for novel agentic patterns to prove viability and inform broader team adoption.
- Collaborate with senior technology and business leaders to articulate trade-offs, influence roadmaps, and align platform strategy with Nordstroms long-term AI vision.
- Contribute to Nordstrom-wide engineering standards, open-source initiatives, and the broader AI engineering community.
You Own This If You Have
Must Have
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, witha track recordof designing and delivering large-scale distributed platforms.
- AI Fluency Required: Deep, hands-on experience with LLMs, foundation model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.), prompt engineering, RAG architectures, and embedding-based search in production environments.
- Platform engineering in AI teams You have built or significantly contributed to shared AI infrastructure or developer platforms within an AI-focused product organization, enabling multiple teams to build on top of your foundation.
- Strongproficiencyin Python and/or Java; experiencedwith cloud-native development on AWS and/or GCP.
- Expertisearchitecting complex, scalable distributed systems microservices, event-driven architectures, API gateways, and data pipelines.
- Highly skilled at applying architectural patterns to express complex, scalable systems thatoptimize forsimplicity, operational support, andimplementationvelocity.
- Demonstrated experience influencing senior technical and business leaders, with the ability to clearly articulate engineering trade-offs and drive cross-team decisions.
- Strong DevOpsfoundationCI/CD (GitLab or equivalent), containerization (Kubernetes/Docker), observability and telemetry, and SLA-driven reliability engineering.
- Experience with Agile methodologies, continuous improvement mindset, and security-first development practices.
- Track recordof mentoring and growing engineering talent across multiple teams.
- Bachelors orMasters degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, ora relatedfield.
Nice to Have
- Hands-on experience building AI Agentic systems designing and deploying autonomous agents using frameworks such asLangGraph,AutoGen,CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or OpenAI Assistants API.
- Familiarity with multi-agent orchestration patterns: task decomposition, tool-use pipelines, agent memory (short-term and long-term), and human-in-the-loop workflows.
- Experience with agent evaluation frameworks, safety guardrails, and responsible AI deployment in production at scale.
- Background in retail, e-commerce, or supply chain understanding ofhow AI agents can power inventory, fulfillment, personalization, or customer service workflows.
- Contributions to open-source AI or platform projects; activeparticipantin the broader AI/ML engineering community.
- Experience with data science-enabled solutions, big data technologies (Spark,BigQuery, Redshift), and integrating ML models into production platforms.
Weve got you covered
Our employees are our most important asset and thats reflected in our benefits.Nordstrom is proud to offer a variety of benefits to support employees and their families, including:
Medical/Vision, Dental, Retirement and Paid Time Away
Life Insurance and Disability
Merchandise Discount and EAP Resources
A few more important points...
The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. Its not all-inclusive. There may be additional duties, responsibilities and qualifications for this job.
Pay Range Details
The pay range(s) below has been provided in compliance with state specific laws. Pay ranges may be different for other locations.
Pay offers are dependent on the location, as well as job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
$191,000.00 - $297,000.00 AnnualThis position may be eligible for performance-based incentives/bonuses. Benefits include 401k, medical/vision/dental/life/disability insurance options, PTO accruals, Holidays, and more. Eligibility requirements may apply based on location, job level, classification, and length of employment. Learn more in the Nordstrom Benefits Overview by copying and pasting the following URL into your browser: https://careers.nordstrom.com/pdfs/Ben_Overview_17-19.pdf
