Principal Engineer: AI Agentic Platform (Hybrid - Seattle, WA)
At a glance
AI generatedTL;DR
As a Principal Engineer at Nordstrom, you will lead the design and development of the AI Agentic Platform, a foundational system enabling autonomous AI agents to enhance customer experiences and streamline operations across multiple domains such as commerce, inventory, and customer service. Your responsibilities include architecting scalable distributed systems, integrating large language models and vector stores, and establishing platform engineering standards that accelerate delivery across teams. You will work closely with AI/ML and product teams to translate business goals into technical capabilities, mentor engineers, and serve as the primary escalation point for complex issues. The ideal candidate has over a decade of experience in building large-scale distributed platforms, proficiency in Python or Java, expertise in cloud-native development on AWS or GCP, and a deep understanding of AI fluency and DevOps practices. Experience with retail-specific applications and contributions to open-source projects are also valued.
Skills
What you'll do
- Define and evolve the AI Agentic Platform to enable autonomous agent workflows across Nordstrom’s technology ecosystem.
- Translate business goals into platform capabilities by partnering with AI/ML and product teams.
- Lead cross-team design reviews and establish engineering standards for the AI Agentic Platform.
- Evaluate and integrate LLM APIs, vector stores, RAG patterns, and emerging agentic frameworks.
- Serve as the technical escalation point for complex agentic system issues and operational incidents.
- Drive decisions on platform observability, evaluation, and guardrails to ensure reliable agent behavior.
What we're looking for
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience in designing and delivering large-scale distributed platforms.
- Deep hands-on experience with LLMs, foundation model APIs, prompt engineering, RAG architectures, and embedding-based search.
- Strong proficiency in Python or Java; experienced with cloud-native development on AWS or GCP.
- Expertise in architecting complex, scalable distributed systems including microservices and event-driven architectures.
- Demonstrated ability to influence senior technical and business leaders, clearly articulating engineering trade-offs and driving cross-team decisions.
- Strong DevOps foundation including CI/CD pipelines, containerization, observability, and reliability engineering.
Employer
About Nordstrom
Nordstrom is a leading American luxury department store chain offering a wide selection of clothing, shoes, accessories, and beauty products through its stores, Nordstrom Rack outlets, and online. Industry: Luxury Department Store Retail
Nordstrom currently has 24 open roles on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs $142,000–$220,500 across 24 roles with salary data.
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