About the Role
Nordstrom is building the next generation of AI-powered retail experiences, and the AI Agentic Platform is at the heart of that transformation. We are looking for a visionary Principal Engineer to lead the design, architecture, and development of a foundational platform that enables AI agents to autonomously reason, act, and collaborate across Nordstrom’s technology ecosystem.
As a Principal Engineer (Level 19), you are a functional expert and advisory individual contributor responsible for work across multiple teams. You will establish design 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 Nordstrom leverages autonomous 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, establish platform 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 across teams; 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 Nordstrom’s 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, with a track record of 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.
- Strong proficiency in Python and/or Java; experienced with cloud-native development on AWS and/or GCP.
- Expertise architecting complex, scalable distributed systems — microservices, event-driven architectures, API gateways, and data pipelines.
- Highly skilled at applying architectural patterns to express complex, scalable systems that optimize for simplicity, operational support, and implementation velocity.
- Demonstrated experience influencing senior technical and business leaders, with the ability to clearly articulate engineering trade-offs and drive cross-team decisions.
- Strong DevOps foundation — CI/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 record of mentoring and growing engineering talent across multiple teams.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
Nice to Have
- Hands-on experience building AI Agentic systems — designing and deploying autonomous agents using frameworks such as LangGraph, 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 of how AI agents can power inventory, fulfillment, personalization, or customer service workflows.
- Contributions to open-source AI or platform projects; active participant in 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.
We’ve got you covered…
Our employees are our most important asset and that’s 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. It’s not all-inclusive. There may be additional duties, responsibilities and qualifications for this job.
For Los Angeles or San Francisco applicants: Nordstrom is required to inform you that we conduct background checks after conditional offer and consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with legal requirements per Los Angeles, Cal. Muni. Code 189.04 and the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. For additional state and location specific notices, please refer to the Legal Notices document within the FAQ section of the Nordstrom Careers site.
Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation should contact the nearest Nordstrom location, which can be identified at www.nordstrom.com.
Please be mindful that there may be legal notices and requirements related to this job posting that are specific to your state. Review the Career Site FAQ’s for relevant information and guidelines.
© 2022 Nordstrom, Inc
Current Nordstrom employees: To apply, log into Workday, click the Careers button and then click Find Jobs.
Nordstrom keeps job postings open for at least one day after the posting date.
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.
Skills Required
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Deep hands-on experience with LLMs and model APIs
- Experience in building shared AI infrastructure
- Proficiency in Python and/or Java
- Expertise in complex distributed systems architecture
- Strong DevOps foundation with CI/CD and reliability engineering
- Experience with Agile methodologies
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field
- Hands-on experience building AI Agentic systems
- Familiarity with multi-agent orchestration patterns
- Experience with agent evaluation frameworks in production
- Background in retail or e-commerce
- Contributions to open-source AI projects
Nordstrom Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Nordstrom and has not been reviewed or approved by Nordstrom.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare options are described as broad, including medical, dental, and vision coverage alongside virtual care and mental health support. Additional protections like disability coverage, life/AD&D, and accounts such as HSA/FSA further strengthen the overall health-and-protection offering.
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Retirement Support — Retirement benefits include a 401(k) plan with a defined employer match structure and access to additional financial programs like an employee stock purchase plan. Commuter accounts, transit subsidies, and adoption assistance add to the overall financial support beyond base pay.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time-away benefits include PTO accrual, paid holidays, bereavement leave, parental and bonding leave, and a sabbatical program after tenure. PTO sharing and donation options expand flexibility in how time off can be used and supported across colleagues.
Nordstrom Insights
What We Do
When you join Nordstrom, you join a fast-paced and entrepreneurial environment is paired with the strong history and experience of the Nordstrom retail legacy. We have access to some of the greatest minds in retail and technology and are constantly creating innovative strategies to develop the ultimate apparel solutions.
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