Senior Engineer 2: AI Agentic Solutions (Hybrid - Seattle, WA)

About the role

The AI Agentic Solutions team at Nordstrom is dedicated to driving innovation through AI. As a Senior Engineer, you will partner with business and technology teams to design and build agentic AI solutions that enhance Nordstrom's operations.

Responsibilities

• Partner with business and technology stakeholders to define the “art of the possible” with agents, translating ambiguous problems into clear, measurable solutions.
• Design and build core agentic solutions end-to-end across multiple weeks or months, ensuring full integration with enterprise systems.
• Apply context engineering to ensure agents have the right information at the right time, balancing token economics, latency, and decision quality.
• Develop and own evaluations and guardrails to ensure solutions are safe, reliable, and accurate, using offline benchmarks, online telemetry, and failure-mode analysis.
• Architect memory and state management approaches that allow agents to reason across sessions, users, and workflows, including short-term context, long-term memory, and durable conversation state.
• Integrate LLM APIs, embedding models, vector stores, and agentic frameworks into production services, evaluating and adopting emerging techniques as needed.
• Make and clearly articulate technical trade-offs between short-term delivery needs and long-term scalability, considering design, framework choice, model selection, and infrastructure costs.
• Design systems that align with current and upcoming product cycles, team-level cost responsibility, and cross-functional roadmaps.
• Lead design and code reviews, providing actionable feedback and maintaining a high bar for quality, testability, and extensibility.
• Drive accountability for performance, cost, accuracy, and security of feature work, while also designing key metrics, evaluations, and observability patterns.
• Work with business, infrastructure, and security teams to deliver enhancements, reliability improvements, and bug fixes for production AI systems.
• Surface potential design or delivery conflicts and recommend the best path forward.
• Mentor and support junior engineers across a wide spectrum of technical activities, participating in hiring interviews with clear, specific feedback.
• Ensure own work and team members' work follow Nordstrom's engineering and security standards, contributing to those standards.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of designing and delivering complex, scalable distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience working with LLMs, foundation model APIs, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures, and embedding-based search in production environments.
• Experience designing, building, and operating AI agents or agentic workflows in production, including tool-use, orchestration, and integration with downstream systems.
• A strong understanding of how to assemble, prune, and structure context for agents to maximize decision quality within token, latency, and cost constraints.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks and safety guardrails for LLM-based systems, including offline benchmarks, online telemetry, and responsible deployment practices.
• Familiarity with short-term and long-term memory patterns for agents, vector stores, conversation state, and durable workflow state.
• Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks such as Claude Agent SDK, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or OpenAI Assistants API.
• Familiarity with multi-agent orchestration patterns: task decomposition, tool-use pipelines, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• A product-minded approach to engineering: strong instincts for user impact, comfortable pushing back on requirements when the right solution isn’t the one initially asked for, and able to translate business intent into agentic capabilities.
• Proficiency in Python; strong grasp of multiple tech stacks and cloud-native development on AWS and/or GCP.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams including product, business, infrastructure, and security stakeholders.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills; ability to articulate complex technical decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Agile development experience (Scrum, Kanban, Lean, or similar) with a continuous improvement and quality mindset.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Qualifications

• Must have hands-on experience with LLMs, foundation model APIs, and prompt engineering.
• Experience designing and operating AI agents or agentic workflows in production.
• Strong understanding of context engineering and its application to agents.
• Experience with evaluation frameworks and safety guardrails for LLM-based systems.
• Familiarity with memory and state management for agents.
• Experience with agentic frameworks and multi-agent orchestration patterns.
• A product-minded approach to engineering.
• Proficiency in Python and experience with multiple tech stacks.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams.

Skills

• AI Fluency
• Context Engineering
• Evaluations and Guardrails
• Memory and State Management
• Agentic Frameworks
• Multi-Agent Orchestration
• Product Mindset
• Python Proficiency
• Cloud-Native Development
• Agile Methodologies

Benefits

We offer a comprehensive benefits package to support our employees and their families, including:

• Medical/Vision, Dental, Retirement
• Paid Time Off
• Life Insurance and Disability
• Merchandise Discount and EAP Resources
• Performance-based Incentives/Bonuses

Pay Range

$166,000.00 - $258,000.00 Annual