Principal Engineer – Discovery, Marketing & Loyalty

Nordstrom

. Architect scalable, reliable technical solutions that serve millions of customers in a high-throughput, low SLA environment .

Posted 5/7/2026full-timeSeattle • Washington • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $191,000 - $297,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudDistributed SystemsMicroservices

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Architect scalable, reliable technical solutions that serve millions of customers in a high-throughput, low SLA environment
Lead technical strategy for evolving our loyalty and marketing ecosystem, driving the conversation around next-generation capabilities while ensuring solutions are performant, secure, and provide exceptional omnichannel user experiences
Drive technical excellence across engineering teams, establishing best practices for distributed systems, highly performant APIs, and data processing at scale
Champion operational excellence by driving improvements in observability, telemetry, monitoring, and automation increasing system reliability and resiliency
Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams including Product, Operations and business stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver solutions that drive business impact
Provide technical leadership as an individual contributor, mentoring and influencing engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and architectural guidance
Evangelize and drive adoption of AI technologies across engineering teams to accelerate productivity, improve code quality, and increase speed of delivery through intelligent tooling and automation
Partner with platform and enterprise services teams to ensure cohesive integration across the enterprise technology ecosystem

Requirements

What you’ll need

10+ years of relevant work experience in software engineering with significant focus on e-commerce systems, distributed architectures, or customer-facing applications
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field, with a master's degree preferred, or equivalent experience
4+ years of technical leadership experience as an individual contributor, influencing engineering teams and driving technical direction in dynamic, high-scale e-commerce or digital retail environments
Strong mentoring capabilities with a track record of developing engineers' technical skills and helping them grow their expertise in complex domains
Strong background in distributed systems design, including experience with microservices architectures, event-driven systems, and handling high-volume transaction workloads
Expertise with cloud platforms and modern technology stacks for building resilient, scalable customer-facing applications
Proven track record of building production-grade systems that handle business-critical operations with high availability requirements (99.95%+ uptime)
Experience designing systems with API integration patterns, asynchronous processing, and data consistency strategies across distributed services
Strong architectural software, service, and infrastructure design patterns with capabilities, demonstrating the ability to discuss, influence, and make trade-off decisions at multiple system levels, across domains
Deep commitment to operational excellence, including expertise in observability tools, automated testing, deployment automation, and proactive monitoring
Customer-focused mindset with ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions and communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
Demonstrated ability to drive technical innovation while balancing practical business needs, operational constraints, and system stability.

Benefits

Comp & perks

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

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

software engineeringe-commerce systemsdistributed architecturesmicroservicesevent-driven systemscloud platformsAPI integrationasynchronous processingobservability toolsdeployment automation

Soft Skills

technical leadershipmentoringcollaborationcustomer-focused mindsetcommunicationinfluencingproblem-solvingoperational excellencetechnical innovationstrategic thinking

Certifications

Bachelor’s degree in computer scienceBachelor’s degree in EngineeringMaster’s degree in related field