Principal Engineer - Agentic AI Platform (Hybrid - Seattle,WA)

Nordstrom, Inc.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 191,000 - 297,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Vision, Dental

Retirement

Paid Time Away

Merchandise Discount

Job summary

Nordstrom, Inc. is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the design, architecture, and development of the AI Agentic Platform that enables autonomous agent reasoning and collaboration at scale.

You will partner with AI/ML and product teams, set design principles, drive platform strategy for a year, and mentor engineers while establishing reusable architecture artifacts to accelerate delivery across Nordstrom’s technology ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience designing large-scale distributed platforms.
• Deep hands-on experience with LLMs, foundation models, prompt engineering, RAG architectures, and embedding-based search.
• Experience building shared AI infrastructure or developer platforms enabling multiple teams.
• Strong proficiency in Python and/or Java; cloud-native development on AWS and/or GCP.
• Expertise architecting complex, scalable distributed systems and API gateways.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve the AI Agentic Platform with agent orchestration, tool use, memory, and multi-agent coordination.
• Lead cross-team design reviews and establish platform engineering standards.
• Evaluate and integrate AI frameworks and APIs; mentor engineers across teams.
• Define observability, guardrails, and reliability for autonomous agents.

Skills

AI Fluency

Python

Java

Cloud native

Distributed systems

DevOps

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS/CE

Tools

LangGraph

AutoGen

Semantic Kernel

OpenAI APIs

AWS

GCP

Job description

Job Description

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 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 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, 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 DevOpsfoundation— 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 recordof mentoring and growing engineering talent across multiple teams.

• Bachelor’s orMaster’s 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 —understandingofhow 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.

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 Annual

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

This 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

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.

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