Principal Engineer: AI Agentic Platform; Hybrid - Seattle, WA

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 for work across multiple teams. You will establish design 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 Nordstrom leverages autonomous AI to enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and accelerate engineering productivity.

• 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, establish platform 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., Lang Graph, Auto Gen, OpenAI Assistants API, Semantic Kernel).
• Mentor and coach engineers across teams; 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.

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of 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.
• Strong proficiency in Python and/or Java; experienced with cloud‑native development on AWS and/or GCP.
• Expertise architecting complex, scalable distributed systems — microservices, event‑driven architectures, API gateways, and data pipelines.
• Highly skilled at applying architectural patterns to express complex, scalable systems that optimize for simplicity, operational support, and implementation velocity.
• Demonstrated experience influencing senior technical and business leaders, with the ability to clearly articulate engineering trade‑offs and drive cross‑team decisions.
• Strong Dev Ops foundation — CI/CD (Git Lab 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 record of mentoring and growing engineering talent across multiple teams.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.

• Hands‑on experience building AI Agentic systems — designing and deploying autonomous agents using frameworks such as Lang Graph, Auto Gen, CrewAI,…