Engineering Manager - Personalization; Hybrid - Seattle

Job Description This role is offered as hybrid in Seattle, WA. Candidates must be available to work in office at the Nordstrom corporate headquarters a minimum of 4 days/week to be considered for this position. Engineering Managers within our Technology organization create an inspiring workplace where talented professionals are empowered to deliver outstanding digital experiences and business results. As the Engineering Manager for Personalization, you will lead the team that owns the models and services behind how Nordstrom personalizes what customers see, from training pipelines to real-time recommendations and complete-look outfits.

This is a hands‑on leadership role for someone who brings engineering discipline, stakeholder credibility, and a clear point of view to a domain that directly shapes the customer experience.

We are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the engineering team behind Nordstrom's Personalization Engine, the recommendation and styling capabilities that shape what customers see across marketing and digital experiences. You will report to the Senior Director of Engineering who supports Marketing Technology and Personalization and own delivery, reliability, and team health for these products. Personalization Engine produces ranked, personalized recommendations at scale leveraging cutting‑edge machine learning and generative AI.

It builds on the same foundations to deliver product recommendations as well as complete looks with extensibility across other content types. The team sits within Marketing Technology and Personalization. You will partner closely with data science, product, and platform engineering. The organization is adopting an AI‑native product development lifecycle and organizing around Flow and SRE squads, with managers operating as player‑coaches.

This team has real strengths and a culture worth protecting. We are looking for a leader who builds on what is working, communicates openly, and earns trust through consistency.

Define the technical direction for Personalization: how behavioral and product signals become ranked recommendations and complete‑look outfits across Nordstrom's marketing and digital experiences, then build alignment across product, data science, and platform teams to make it real. Lead a team of engineers, giving them room to own their work, developing engineers into technical leaders, and investing in where each person wants to take their career.

Own the reliability of a high‑scale personalization platform that supports customer experiences across digital properties for Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack. Raise the standard for model quality, data quality, and observability so problems are caught before customers or stakeholders see them. Challenge the team to think critically about the right approaches and the right problems to solve, not just to stay busy.

Operate as a player‑coach: stay close to architecture, code reviews, and incident response while building the team's AI‑native ways of planning, building, and shipping. Bring delivery discipline that the team and its partners can count on: shaping clear priorities, committing to dates, and consistently hitting them. Be the face of the team to the business and senior leadership: translate complex model and platform work into clear value, advocate for the team, and build a vision for growing its scope and bringing in new projects.

Communicate openly and without surprises, sharing context freely, especially when priorities shift or change is coming. Build on the culture and strengths this team already has, and respect what is working before changing it. Trust the team and avoid micromanaging: set clear expectations and give people room to…