Principal Engineer – Agentic AI Platform

Nordstrom

. Architect and evolve Nordstrom’s AI Agentic Platform, including agent orchestration, tool use, memory, and multi-agent coordination .

Posted 10/7/2026full-timeSeattle • Washington • United StatesLead💰 $191,000 - $297,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudDistributed SystemsGoogle Cloud PlatformJavaMicroservicesPython

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Architect and evolve Nordstrom’s AI Agentic Platform, including agent orchestration, tool use, memory, and multi-agent coordination
Partner with AI/ML and product teams to translate business goals into platform capabilities for autonomous agent workflows
Lead cross-team design reviews and establish platform engineering standards
Create reusable architecture artifacts to accelerate organizational delivery
Evaluate and integrate LLM APIs, vector stores, RAG patterns, and agentic frameworks
Mentor and coach engineers across teams
Serve as the technical escalation point for complex agentic system issues and significant operational incidents
Drive platform observability, evaluation, and guardrail decisions
Develop hands-on proofs of concept for novel agentic patterns
Collaborate with senior technology and business leaders to articulate trade-offs, influence roadmaps, and align platform strategy with Nordstrom’s AI vision
Contribute to Nordstrom-wide engineering standards, open-source initiatives, and the broader AI engineering community

Requirements

What you’ll need

10+ years of professional software engineering experience
Track record of designing and delivering large-scale distributed platforms
Deep, hands-on experience with LLMs, foundation model APIs, prompt engineering, RAG architectures, and embedding-based search in production environments
Experience building or significantly contributing to shared AI infrastructure or developer platforms within an AI-focused product organization
Strong proficiency in Python and/or Java
Experience with cloud-native development on AWS and/or GCP
Expertise architecting complex, scalable distributed systems, including microservices, event-driven architectures, API gateways, and data pipelines
Ability to apply architectural patterns that optimize for simplicity, operational support, and implementation velocity
Experience influencing senior technical and business leaders and driving cross-team decisions
Strong DevOps foundation, including CI/CD, containerization, observability, telemetry, and SLA-driven reliability engineering
Experience with Agile methodologies, continuous improvement, 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 is nice to have
Familiarity with multi-agent orchestration patterns is nice to have
Experience with agent evaluation frameworks, safety guardrails, and responsible AI deployment is nice to have
Background in retail, e-commerce, or supply chain is nice to have
Contributions to open-source AI or platform projects are nice to have
Experience with data science-enabled solutions and big data technologies is nice to have

Benefits

Comp & perks

Medical/Vision
Dental
Retirement and Paid Time Away
Life Insurance and Disability
Merchandise Discount
EAP Resources
Performance-based incentives/bonuses may be available
401k
PTO accruals
Holidays
Disability insurance options