Director of Engineering - Platform Services, Developer Platform (Hybrid - Seattle, WA)
About the role
A Director within the Nordstrom Technology organization helps create an inspiring workplace where talented people are empowered to drive customer experiences and business results. This key leader influences the organization through servant leadership and leads with empathy. They set the strategic direction for a division or area with broad and deep technical knowledge and a clear line of sight into how the organization's work advances the business strategy.
We are seeking a Technology Leader to join the Developer Platform Core Leadership Team. The Developer Platform team exists to help engineers focus on business challenges and spend less time on infrastructure and operations. We build and support platforms, tools, and increasingly AI-powered capabilities across the entire Software Development Lifecycle. Centralized platform capabilities let us build once and reuse everywhere, rather than rebuilding for each team or project. We treat the platform as a product, with engineers as our customers and adoption, reliability, and developer experience as our measures of success.
This role leads the teams responsible for the Kubernetes Platform (our container and compute foundation), Airflow (workflow orchestration), Kafka (event streaming), Temporal (durable workflow execution), and the Machine Learning Platform (how we build, deploy, and run machine learning in production). Together, these are the foundation Nordstrom engineers use to run services, move data, orchestrate work, and ship machine learning to production.
Responsibilities
- Leads the teams that build, operate, and evolve the Kubernetes Platform, Airflow, Kafka, Temporal, and the Machine Learning Platform as reliable, self-service products
- Designs organizational structures and talent plans that match the needs of the organization, and builds a bench of future leaders
- Identifies, develops, and coaches leaders; builds high-performing, inclusive teams
- Owns and is accountable for creating new systems and evolving existing ones, balancing reliability, cost, and speed of delivery
- Drives architectural decisions across the function and the enterprise, including build-vs-buy choices and the roadmap for each platform
- Partners with business and technology leaders to provide technical advice and shape strategy: gathers requirements, maps them to implementation, and selects the right technology
- Sets product-oriented roadmaps and defines success metrics (adoption, developer productivity, reliability, cost efficiency) and reports on them transparently
- Leads large-scale platform migrations and upgrades with minimal disruption to the teams that depend on them
- Champions responsible adoption of AI and automation across engineering workflows
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field (Master's preferred)
- 10+ years of relevant work experience in technology
- 5+ years of enterprise team leadership in dynamic, high-scale environments
- 5+ years leading and developing teams
- 3+ years managing managers
- Experience leading platform engineering, developer tooling, or infrastructure at scale, with working knowledge of Kubernetes and container orchestration, workflow orchestration (Airflow, Temporal), event streaming (Kafka), and machine learning platforms
- Experience running shared platforms as products, including vendor and open-source evaluation, integration, and lifecycle management
- A proven record of individual excellence and a demonstrated commitment to making others great
- Familiar with modern software development practices but relies on collaboration, not just process, to drive outcomes
- Strong customer and stakeholder empathy; can channel many points of view, synthesize them, and drive alignment even amid friction and disagreement
- Strong negotiating and influencing skills, with the ability to lead through others
Pay
Pay range: $200,500.00 - $332,000.00 Annual. Pay ranges may be different for other locations. Pay offers are dependent on the location, as well as job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
Benefits
- Medical, Vision, Dental, Retirement and Paid Time Away
- Life Insurance and Disability
- Merchandise Discount and EAP Resources
- Performance-based incentives/bonuses (eligible)
- 401k, medical/vision/dental/life/disability insurance options, PTO accruals, Holidays, and more