Senior Principal Platform & SRE Architect - Hybrid Seattle

Nordstrom, Inc.; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 201,000 - 332,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Vision, Dental, Retirement and

Paid Time Away

Life Insurance and Disability

Merchandise Discount and EAP Resources

Job summary

Nordstrom, Inc. is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to lead Nordstrom's cloud platform, CI/CD, and SRE efforts. You will shape enterprise-wide architecture and drive reliability initiatives across multiple teams, balancing performance, cost, and scale.

You will set the technical direction, mentor senior engineers, and influence decision-making across Platform, SRE, Security, and product groups in a hybrid Seattle-based role.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of professional software or infrastructure engineering experience and a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Deep, hands-on architectural experience with large-scale cloud platforms, including containerized workloads on Kubernetes in production, multi-account cloud estates, and shared services owned centrally but consumed by many teams.
• Demonstrated depth in continuous delivery at enterprise scale: progressive delivery and canary analysis, immutable artifact identity and promotion-over-rebuild discipline, configuration as versioned deployment, and rollback design that holds up when state is forward-incompatible.
• Experience with software supply chain security beyond scanning, including build provenance, artifact signing or attestation, and policy enforcement at deploy time.
• A track record establishing SRE practice at scale: SLOs and error budgets that influence release decisions, observability standards, incident command, and an informed view of why measures of central tendency are weak signals for reliability.
• Architectural experience with resilience posture, covering blast-radius isolation patterns such as cell-based architecture, multi-region active-passive and active/active trade-offs, data consistency under concurrent writes, and rehearsed failover.
• Experience engineering for large, predictable traffic peaks in retail, e-commerce, marketplace, or a comparably seasonal environment, including capacity forecasting, load and scale testing, and chaos exercises against revenue-critical journeys.
• Sound cost judgment, with a history of recommending reliability investment that leadership can defend financially, and the willingness to argue against expensive architecture that the organization cannot yet operate.
• A record of influence without authority: setting standards that teams adopt because they are useful, resolving cross-team technical conflict in a way both sides can live with, and moving organizations you do not manage.
• Informed, skeptical perspective on AI for operations and delivery, including where agent-based investigation and automated remediation currently work and where published results do not yet support autonomy.
• Judgment about organizational design in engineering, including the failure modes of centralized operations functions and how ownership boundaries shape whether reliability improves.
• Ability to write and speak clearly enough that a standard, a trade-off, or a risk lands with engineers and with executives in the same room and the same document.

Responsibilities

• Own the north star architecture for cloud platform, CI/CD, and SRE, and hold a view that runs two to three years out, deliberately past the current product cycle.
• Establish the design principles that let teams make sound calls without needing you in the room.
• Attach reliability targets to what the business does rather than to the services that happen to carry it.
• Drive consensus on direction across Platform, SRE, Security, and product teams and enforce standards in the pipeline and production validation gating.
• Guide design reviews inside and outside your organization and set SRE up to scale accordingly.
• Identify industry trends and decide which to adopt, wait on, or skip entirely.
• Act as a technical decision maker during significant incidents and turn lessons into platform defaults.
• Mentor engineers, encourage open debate, and represent Nordstrom's platform engineering externally.

Skills

Cloud architecture

SRE leadership

CI/CD

Reliability engineering

Cost optimization

Cross-team collaboration

Strategic influence

Clear communication

Incident response

Architectural decision making

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Service mesh

Job description

Nordstrom, Inc. is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to lead Nordstrom's cloud platform, CI/CD, and SRE efforts. You will shape enterprise-wide architecture and drive reliability initiatives across multiple teams, balancing performance, cost, and scale.

You will set the technical direction, mentor senior engineers, and influence decision-making across Platform, SRE, Security, and product groups in a hybrid Seattle-based role.