Nordstrom is investing in AI to drive retail innovation, and is building a shared AI Agentic Platform that enables AI agents to autonomously reason, use tools, coordinate across systems, and act on behalf of customers and business teams. As a Senior Engineer, you will be a lead individual contributor responsible for designing and building core platform capabilities such as agent orchestration, tool-use pipelines, memory systems, and APIs, while championing AI fluency and technical excellence.
Responsibilities
Design and build core AI Agentic Platform capabilities including agent orchestration, tool-use pipelines, memory systems, and APIs.
Own end-to-end solution design for platform components with full upstream and downstream integration considerations.
Integrate LLM APIs, embedding models, vector stores, and RAG patterns into platform services; evaluate and adopt emerging agentic frameworks.
Balance short-term delivery needs and long-term platform scalability in technical decisions.
Lead design and code reviews, maintaining high quality, testability, and extensibility standards.
Design key metrics, events, and observability patterns for platform components.
Collaborate with business, infrastructure, and security teams to deliver enhancements and reliability improvements.
Mentor junior engineers and participate in hiring interviews.
Nordstrom is a leading fashion retailer that operates full-line department stores and off-price Nordstrom Rack stores in the United States. It offers a wide variety of clothing, footwear, accessories, and home goods through its physical stores and online platforms.
6+ years of professional software engineering experience with scalable distributed systems.
Hands-on experience with LLMs, foundation model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), prompt engineering, RAG architectures, and embedding-based search in production.
Experience contributing to shared AI infrastructure or developer platforms that enable other teams to build AI-powered features.
Proficiency in Python and/or Java, with strong cloud-native development on AWS and/or GCP.
Experience with RESTful services, event-driven architectures, and backend databases (SQL, NoSQL, or cloud-native datastores).
Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, and modern CI/CD tools like GitLab.
Strong emphasis on observability: real-time alerting, dashboards, and performance accountability.
Excellent communication skills and experience working with cross-functional teams.
Agile development experience and a continuous improvement mindset.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice to Have
Hands-on experience building AI agentic systems using frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or OpenAI Assistants API.
Familiarity with multi-agent orchestration patterns: task decomposition, tool-use pipelines, agent memory, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
Experience with agent evaluation frameworks, safety guardrails, and responsible AI agent deployment.
Background in retail, e-commerce, or supply chain domains.
Experience with big data technologies (Spark, BigQuery, Redshift) and integrating ML models into production services.
Contributions to open-source AI or platform projects.
