Principal Engineer - Agentic AI Platform

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.

A Day in the Life

• 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., LangGraph, AutoGen, 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.

You Own This If You Have…

Must Have

• 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 DevOps foundation — CI/CD (GitLab 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.

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience building AI Agentic systems — designing and deploying autonomous agents using frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or OpenAI Assistants API.
• Familiarity with multi-agent orchestration patterns: task decomposition, tool-use pipelines, agent memory (short-term and long-term), and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Experience with agent evaluation frameworks, safety guardrails, and responsible AI deployment in production at scale.
• Background in retail, e-commerce, or supply chain — understanding of how AI agents can power inventory, fulfillment, personalization, or customer service workflows.
• Contributions to open-source AI or platform projects; active participant in the broader AI/ML engineering community.
• Experience with data science-enabled solutions, big data technologies (Spark, BigQuery, Redshift), and integrating ML models into production platforms.

Pay Range Details

The pay range(s) below has been provided in compliance with state specific laws. Pay ranges may be different for other locations.

Pay offers are dependent on the location, as well as job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

$191,000.00 - $297,000.00 Annual

We’ve got you covered…

Our employees are our most important asset and that’s reflected in our benefits. Nordstrom is proud to offer a variety of benefits to support employees and their families, including:

• Medical/Vision, Dental, Retirement and Paid Time Away
• Life Insurance and Disability
• Merchandise Discount and EAP Resources

This position may be eligible for performance-based incentives/bonuses. Benefits include 401k, medical/vision/dental/life/disability insurance options, PTO accruals, Holidays, and more. Eligibility requirements may apply based on location, job level, classification, and length of employment. Learn more in the Nordstrom Benefits Overview by copying and pasting the following URL into your browser: https://careers.nordstrom.com/pdfs/Ben_Overview_17-19.pdf

A few more important points...

The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It’s not all-inclusive. There may be additional duties, responsibilities and qualifications for this job.

For Los Angeles or San Francisco applicants: Nordstrom is required to inform you that we conduct background checks after conditional offer and consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with legal requirements per Los Angeles, Cal. Muni. Code 189.04 and the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. For additional state and location specific notices, please refer to the Legal Notices document within the FAQ section of the Nordstrom Careers site.

Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation should contact the nearest Nordstrom location, which can be identified at www.nordstrom.com (http://www.nordstrom.com/).

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