Principal Engineer, AI Agentic Platform

Nordstrom

Principal Engineer leading the design and architecture of the AI Agentic Platform at Nordstrom. Creating capabilities for autonomous agents to enhance customer experience and streamline operations.

Posted 5/23/2026full-timeSeattle • Washington • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $191,000 - $297,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudDistributed SystemsDockerGoogle Cloud PlatformJavaKubernetesMicroservicesPython

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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

Requirements

What you’ll need

10+ years of professional software engineering experience
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
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

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

AI fluencyLLMsfoundation model APIsprompt engineeringRAG architecturesembedding-based searchPythonJavacloud-native developmentmicroservices

Soft Skills

mentoringinfluencingarticulating trade-offscross-team collaborationleadershipcommunicationproblem-solvingdecision-makingcoachingcontinuous improvement

Certifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer ScienceMaster’s degree in Computer ScienceBachelor’s degree in Computer EngineeringMaster’s degree in Computer Engineering