Senior AI Platform Engineer

Job Title: Engineer Senior 2, AI Agentic Platform

Location: Seattle, WA 98101 (Onsite – 4 days/week)

Duration: 06-month contract (with possible extension and potential for Conversion? Possible yes)

Work Schedule: Monday–Friday, 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM PST (40 hours/week)

Start Date: Targeting July 2026

Pay Rate: $70.42/hr.

- $91.54/hr on W2

Note:
This opportunity is not open for C2C (Corp-to-Corp) candidates.

• **** is investing in AI as a core driver of retail innovation, and the AI Agentic Platform team is building the shared foundation that makes it possible. Our platform enables AI agents to autonomously reason, use tools, coordinate across systems, and take action on behalf of customers and business teams — powering experiences across commerce, personalization, inventory, and customer service.
• As an Engineer Senior 2 (Level 18), you are a lead individual contributor responsible for the quality of a team’s work and capable of tackling complex design and problem solving without supervision. You will design systems spanning multiple weeks or months of work, make technical decisions that balance short and long-term business objectives, and take ownership of team-level costs and metrics.
  
  You will champion new techniques, mentor junior engineers, and be a key technical voice in cross-functional discussions.

• Design and build core AI Agentic Platform capabilities — including agent orchestration layers, tool-use pipelines, memory systems, and APIs that enable product teams across Nordstrom to deploy AI agents.
• Own end-to-end solution design for platform components spanning multiple engineers’ work, with full upstream/downstream integration consideration.
• Apply AI fluency to integrate LLM APIs, embedding models, vector stores, and RAG patterns into platform services; evaluate and adopt emerging agentic frameworks as appropriate.
• Make and clearly articulate technical trade-offs between short-term delivery needs and long-term platform scalability, factoring in design, component choice, and infrastructure costs.
• Design systems accounting for current and upcoming product cycles, team-level cost responsibility, and alignment with cross-functional roadmaps.
• Lead design and code reviews across the team; provide actionable feedback and maintain a high bar for quality, testability, and extensibility.
• Design key metrics, events, and observability patterns for platform components; drive accountability for performance and security of feature work.
• Work with business, infrastructure, and security teams to deliver enhancements, reliability improvements, and bug fixes for production AI systems.
• Surface potential design or delivery conflicts in the current or upcoming product cycle and make clear recommendations on the best path forward.
• Mentor and support junior engineers across a wide spectrum of technical activities; participate in hiring interviews with clear, specific feedback.
• Ensure own work and team members’ work follows Nordstrom’s engineering and security standards; contribute to those standards.

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of designing and delivering complex, scalable distributed systems.
• AI Fluency (Required):
  Hands-on experience working with LLMs, foundation model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.), prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures, and embedding‑based search in production environments.
• Platform engineering in AI teams — contributed to or built shared AI infrastructure or developer platforms that enable other engineering teams to build AI‑powered features.
• Proficiency in Python and/or Java.
• Strong understanding of cloud‑native development on AWS and/or GCP.
• Experience with RESTful APIs, event‑driven architectures, and backend databases (SQL, No
  
  SQL, or cloud‑native data stores).
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, and modern CI/CD practices (Git Lab or similar).
• Demonstrated experience designing systems spanning multiple weeks or months while balancing short‑ and long‑term trade‑offs.
• Strong focus on observability including monitoring, metrics, dashboards, and alerting.
• Experience collaborating with product,…