Senior Principal Engineer – Platform, SRE

Nordstrom

. Own the north star architecture for cloud platform, CI/CD, and SRE over a two- to three-year horizon .

Posted 9/17/2026full-timeSeattle • Washington • United StatesSenior💰 $200,500 - $332,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates extensive architectural expertise in large-scale cloud platforms, with a strong focus on CI/CD, SRE practices, and incident management. Proven ability to mentor senior engineers and drive cross-team collaboration while establishing design principles and reliability targets.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Cloud Platform ArchitectureCI/CD ImplementationSRE Practices EstablishmentKubernetes ContainerizationSoftware Supply Chain Security

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Cloud EngineeringArchitectural DesignIncident ManagementCapacity ForecastingLoad TestingConfiguration as Versioned DeploymentCanary AnalysisObservability StandardsError BudgetsResilience Posture

Soft Skills

Technical MentorshipCross-Team CollaborationConflict ResolutionInfluence Without AuthorityClear Communication

Tools & Technologies

KubernetesCI/CD PipelinesCloud ServicesProduction ValidationArtifact SigningPolicy Enforcement

Certifications & Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer ScienceMaster's Degree in Engineering

Industry Keywords

E-CommerceRetailMarketplaceOperational ArchitectureAI for Operations

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudKubernetes

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own the north star architecture for cloud platform, CI/CD, and SRE over a two- to three-year horizon
Establish design principles that enable teams to make sound technical decisions independently
Identify platform limitations before they cause incidents or missed dates
Own cross-team problems lacking clear ownership and carry them through to solutions
Attach reliability targets to business capabilities and establish deliberate degradation as a design expectation
Drive consensus across Platform, SRE, Security, product, and engineering teams
Enforce standards through pipelines and production validation gating
Guide design reviews and ensure delivered systems match agreed designs
Evaluate industry trends and emerging capabilities for adoption
Act as a technical decision maker during significant incidents
Convert incident learnings into platform defaults
Mentor principal and senior engineers across the organization
Encourage open technical debate and develop senior technical talent
Serve as a trendsetter in hiring for senior technical roles
Represent Nordstrom's platform engineering externally

Requirements

What you’ll need

15+ years of professional software or infrastructure engineering experience
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
Deep hands-on architectural experience with large-scale cloud platforms
Production experience with containerized workloads on Kubernetes
Experience with multi-account cloud estates and centrally owned shared services
Enterprise-scale continuous delivery experience, including progressive delivery, canary analysis, immutable artifact identity, configuration as versioned deployment, and rollback design
Software supply chain security experience, including build provenance, artifact signing or attestation, and deploy-time policy enforcement
Experience establishing SRE practices at scale, including SLOs, error budgets, observability standards, incident command, and reliability measurement
Architectural experience with resilience posture, cell-based architecture, multi-region active-passive and active/active trade-offs, concurrent-write data consistency, and rehearsed failover
Experience engineering for large, predictable traffic peaks in retail, e-commerce, marketplace, or comparable seasonal environments
Experience with capacity forecasting, load and scale testing, and chaos exercises against revenue-critical journeys
Sound cost judgment regarding reliability investment and operationally supportable architecture
Record of influence without authority and cross-team technical conflict resolution
Informed perspective on AI for operations and delivery
Judgment about organizational design in engineering
Ability to write and speak clearly with engineers and executives

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