Director of Engineering, PDLC Agents Platform (Hybrid - Seattle, WA)

Job Description

At Nordstrom, we're more than a luxury retailer – we're a company built on a foundation of customer service, innovation, and a relentless commitment to delivering the best experiences for our customers. Technology is at the heart of our ability to create these experiences, and we're on an exciting journey to leverage AI and agents to make those moments even more personalized, seamless, and impactful.

About the Role

This role sits at the center of Nordstrom's transformation towards an AI Native Operating Model for its product development lifecycle. The role owns the multi-agent platform that enables this transformation. The platform spans the full breadth of a complex agentic system including orchestration, CLI based UI, context engineering, cost management, observability, evaluations, governance, reporting and integration with 3P coding agents (e.g. Claude Code) and models.

Responsibilities

• Define the strategy and roadmap for the PDLC Agents Platform, aligned to Nordstrom's AI-Native Operating Model and broader business and technology goals.
• Lead development of the platform's digital worker (agent) fleet and the delivery lifecycle it enforces — project initialization, product design, development, ship and operate — so the compliant path is the fastest path.
• Own the platform's ship-time policy gate so no agent or change ships unless it's registered, instrumented, guardrail-wrapped, and eval-backed.
• Partner with Security, UX, Architecture, Data Science, Product, and the run-time control-plane team to define and enforce one policy-as-code spine — data classification (including PCI/PII boundaries), approved tools and models, and autonomy tiers — consistently at build time and run time.
• Drive adoption of open agent standards — MCP (Model Context Protocol), A2A (Agent-to-Agent), and OTEL GenAI tracing — as the platform's framework-agnostic foundation, so authoring stays open rather than locked to one vendor.
• Build, mentor, and inspire a high-performing engineering team, and build a succession and talent pipeline of engineering managers and senior engineers.
• Establish best practices for the end-to-end agent lifecycle — build, ship, monitor, and retire — with an emphasis on scalability, security, and responsible autonomy.
• Work with domain engineering and business leaders (Merchandising, Customer Experience, and other pilot domains) to roll out AI-Native squads, confirm required guardrails run every cycle, and support teams as they progress up the autonomy "autopilot dial."

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in leadership roles, including experience leading platform, developer-tools, or agentic/AI engineering teams.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (advanced degrees are a plus).
• Strong technical background in agentic AI systems in production — coding agents, multi-agent orchestration, context engineering and agentic evaluations.
• Understanding of build-time versus run-time governance trade-offs, and experience designing or enforcing policy-as-code controls in a regulated or high-stakes environment.
• Natural collaborator and communicator, able to translate complex technical concepts for a variety of audiences and build strong partnerships across Security, Data Science, and Product.
• Past experience in hiring, mentoring, and growing engineering teams, with an ability to inspire and motivate others through a major platform migration.
• Passion for using AI and agents to solve meaningful problems and create exceptional, trustworthy customer experiences.

Qualifications

• Working knowledge of agent standards and run-time governance tooling: MCP, A2A, OTEL GenAI, agent identity/on-behalf-of ("OBO") authorization, and AI gateway or observability platforms.
• Experience in retail, e-commerce, or other customer-focused industries with PCI (Payment Card Industry) or PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data-handling requirements.

Benefits

We've got you covered… Benefits 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
• Lifetime Insurance and Disability
• Merchandise Discount and EAP Resources

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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