The posting
Job Description
A Senior Principal Engineer at Nordstrom serves as a strategic technical consultant across the entire organization, influencing enterprise-wide architecture and engineering practices. This role influences design trade-off decisions company-wide, solves complex endemic problems, identifies industry trends for implementation, and ensures all engineering solutions are exemplary in terms of robustness, stability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. The Sr. Principal Engineer represents the highest level of technical individual contributor in their organization, who shapes Nordstrom's technology landscape while maintaining a holistic "One Nordstrom" perspective.
We are seeking a Sr. Principal Engineer to lead the continued evolution of the reliability and delivery bar for Nordstrom's CI/CD and cloud platform. The foundation is strong: the large majority of our deployable systems are containerized, run on a single standardized pipeline with mature canary capability, deploy continuously, ship immutable artifacts identified by digest, and are connected through a service mesh. Our next investments extend autonomous deployments into a full autonomous platform, bring in runtime scaling that anticipates business demand rather than reacting to it, and mature our multi-region posture. Underneath all of that, our SRE discipline is expanding quickly, and it builds what it runs on: reliability tooling, load and chaos harnesses, and production validation gating that holds every change to the standard before it reaches a customer. You will set the technical direction for Platform and SRE and make the operational bar easier to meet as you raise it, through intelligent systems that deliver more with greater efficiency.
A day in the life...
- Own the north star architecture for cloud platform, CI/CD, and SRE, and hold a view that runs two to three years out, deliberately past the current product cycle. Establish the design principles that let teams make sound calls without needing you in the room.
- Identify where the platform limits the business before it surfaces as an incident or a missed date. Own the problems that sit between teams and lack clear ownership and carry them to a solution.
- Attach reliability targets to what the business does rather than to the services that happen to carry it. A single system often supports capabilities with different availability needs, and it is rarely worth building everything to the highest tier a system touches. Make deliberate degradation, where the most critical capabilities keep running, the expectation in design reviews.
- Drive consensus on direction across Platform, SRE, Security, and the product and engineering teams that consume what we build. Make standards hold by enforcing them in the pipeline and in production validation gating, so everyone meets the same expectations. Resolve technical disagreement without being divisive.
- Guide design reviews inside and outside your own organization and set SRE up to do the same at scale, so delivered systems match the design that was agreed. When reality argues against a standard, change the standard.
- Identify the industry trends and emerging capabilities worth adopting, and decide which ones Nordstrom should move on now, wait on, or skip entirely. Separate documented production practice from vendor claims and conference aspiration.
- Act as a technical decision maker during significant incidents regardless of which systems are involved, and turn what those incidents teach into platform defaults, not one-team fixes.
- Mentor principal and senior engineers across the organization, encourage open technical debate, and help teams think past the problem currently in front of them. Serve as a trendsetter in hiring for senior technical roles. Represent Nordstrom's platform engineering externally.
You own this if you have...
- 15+ years of professional software or infrastructure engineering experience and a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- Deep, hands-on architectural experience with large-scale cloud platforms, including containerized workloads on Kubernetes in production, multi-account cloud estates, and shared services owned centrally but consumed by many teams.
- Demonstrated depth in continuous delivery at enterprise scale: progressive delivery and canary analysis, immutable artifact identity and promotion-over-rebuild discipline, configuration as versioned deployment, and rollback design that holds up when state is forward-incompatible.
- Experience with software supply chain security beyond scanning, including build provenance, artifact signing or attestation, and policy enforcement at deploy time.
- A track record establishing SRE practice at scale: SLOs and error budgets that influence release decisions, observability standards, incident command, and an informed view of why measures of central tendency are weak signals for reliability.
- Architectural experience with resilience posture, covering blast-radius isolation patterns such as cell-based architecture, multi-region active-passive and active/active trade-offs, data consistency under concurrent writes, and rehearsed failover.
- Experience engineering for large, predictable traffic peaks in retail, e-commerce, marketplace, or a comparably seasonal environment, including capacity forecasting, load and scale testing, and chaos exercises against revenue-critical journeys.
- Sound cost judgment, with a history of recommending reliability investment that leadership can defend financially, and the willingness to argue against expensive architecture that the organization cannot yet operate.
- A record of influence without authority: setting standards that teams adopt because they are useful, resolving cross-team technical conflict in a way both sides can live with, and moving organizations you do not manage.
- Informed, skeptical perspective on AI for operations and delivery, including where agent-based investigation and automated remediation currently work and where published results do not yet support autonomy.
- Judgment about organizational design in engineering, including the failure modes of centralized operations functions and how ownership boundaries shape whether reliability improves.
- Ability to write and speak clearly enough that a standard, a trade-off, or a risk lands with engineers and with executives in the same room and the same document.
This role is offered as hybrid in Seattle, WA. Candidates must be available to work in office at the Nordstrom corporate headquarters a minimum of 4 days/week to be considered for this position.
Pay Range Details
The pay range(s) below has been provided in compliance with state specific laws. Pay ranges may be different for other locations. Pay offers are dependent on the location, as well as job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
$200,500.00 - $332,000.00 Annual
We’ve got you covered…
Our employees are our most important asset and that’s reflected in our benefits. Nordstrom is proud to offer a variety of benefits to support employees and their families, including:
- Medical/Vision, Dental, Retirement and Paid Time Away
- Life Insurance and Disability
- Merchandise Discount and EAP Resources
This position may be eligible for performance-based incentives/bonuses. Benefits include 401k, medical/vision/dental/life/disability insurance options, PTO accruals, Holidays, and more. Eligibility requirements may apply based on location, job level, classification, and length of employment. Learn more in the Nordstrom Benefits Overview by copying and pasting the following URL into your browser: https://careers.nordstrom.com/pdfs/Ben_Overview_20-21.pdf
A few more important points...
The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It’s not all-inclusive. There may be additional duties, responsibilities and qualifications for this job.
For Los Angeles or San Francisco applicants: Nordstrom is required to inform you that we conduct background checks after conditional offer and consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with legal requirements per Los Angeles, Cal. Muni. Code 189.04 and the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. For additional state and location specific notices, please refer to the Legal Notices document within the FAQ section of the Nordstrom Careers site.
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