Senior Principal Engineer, Platform & SRE - Hybrid (Seattle)

Nordstrom, Inc.; Seattle, Northern (WA, KY); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Nordstrom, Inc. seeks a Senior Principal Engineer to lead the evolution of its reliability and delivery bar for the cloud platform, CI/CD, and SRE.

You will set the technical direction, drive governance across Platform, SRE, Security, and product teams, and mentor engineers across the organization. This hybrid role is based in Seattle, WA, with a requirement to be in the Nordstrom headquarters office at least 4 days a week.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of professional software or infrastructure engineering experience.
• Deep, hands-on architectural experience with large-scale cloud platforms.
• Evidence of implementing continuous delivery at enterprise scale.
• Experience with software supply chain security and policy enforcement at deploy time.
• SRE practice at scale: SLOs, error budgets, observability, and incident command.
• Knowledge of resilience patterns: blast-radius isolation, multi-region strategies.
• Experience forecasting capacity for high-traffic retail/e-commerce environments.
• Strong business judgment to justify reliability investments.
• Ability to influence across teams and leaders without direct authority.
• Informed view on AI for operations and delivery; understanding limitations.

Responsibilities

• Own the north star architecture for cloud platform, CI/CD, and SRE with a multi-year view.
• Identify platform limits before incidents and drive cross-team ownership.
• Define reliability targets tied to business outcomes and design for graceful degradation.
• Drive consensus across Platform, SRE, Security, and product teams on standards.
• Lead design reviews and scale SRE practices across the organization.
• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to hiring for senior technical roles.
• Represent Nordstrom's platform engineering externally and set industry trends.

Skills

Senior architecture

Cloud platforms

Kubernetes

Continuous delivery

SRE practices

Observability

Capacity forecasting

Cost judgment

Influence without authority

Communication

Incident response

Reliability engineering

Multi-region architectures

System design reviews

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

CI/CD pipeline tooling

Service mesh

Canary analysis

Artifact signing/attestation

Job description

Nordstrom, Inc. seeks a Senior Principal Engineer to lead the evolution of its reliability and delivery bar for the cloud platform, CI/CD, and SRE.

You will set the technical direction, drive governance across Platform, SRE, Security, and product teams, and mentor engineers across the organization. This hybrid role is based in Seattle, WA, with a requirement to be in the Nordstrom headquarters office at least 4 days a week.