Engineering Manager, Personalization & AI at Scale

Nordstrom; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 166,000 - 258,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Vision

Retirement

PTO

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

Merchandise Discount

EAP Resources

Job summary

Nordstrom in Seattle is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the Personalization engine team, responsible for models, training pipelines, and real-time recommendations across digital experiences. This hands-on leadership role partners with data science, product, and platform engineering to deliver scalable, AI-native solutions.

You will mentor engineers, drive reliability with SLOs, own delivery discipline, and communicate value to senior leadership.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant work experience in software or machine learning engineering.
• 2+ years of experience managing engineering teams, or strong tech-lead experience ready to step into people management.
• Depth in building and operating production ML or recommendation systems at scale, including training pipelines, low-latency model serving, cloud infrastructure, and Kubernetes-based platforms.
• A track record of improving reliability: SLOs, on-call health, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Demonstrated agile delivery discipline: a team that ships what it commits to, on the date it commits to.
• A track record of influencing without authority and communicating with candor, aligning product, engineering, and business partners with competing priorities, and raising concerns early with solutions in hand.
• BA/BS in Computer Science or a closely related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical direction for Personalization and align teams to implement it.
• Lead engineers, grow technical leaders, and invest in career development.
• Own the reliability of a high-scale personalization platform across Nordstrom's digital properties.
• Raise the standard for model quality, data quality, and observability.
• Operate as player-coach, balancing architecture, reviews, and incident response.
• Translate model and platform work into clear business value for leadership.

Skills

Software engineering

Machine learning

Team leadership

Reliability engineering

Agile delivery

Influence without authority

Education

BA/BS in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Vertex AI

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

Job description

Nordstrom in Seattle is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the Personalization engine team, responsible for models, training pipelines, and real-time recommendations across digital experiences. This hands-on leadership role partners with data science, product, and platform engineering to deliver scalable, AI-native solutions.

You will mentor engineers, drive reliability with SLOs, own delivery discipline, and communicate value to senior leadership.