Senior Engineer - Loyalty Technology

About the role

Loyalty touches every Nordstrom customer — and the systems behind it need to be as reliable as the promise they represent. The Loyalty Technology team builds the platform that makes earning, tracking, and redemption work seamlessly across every channel, at scale. We own the services and APIs that power the loyalty experience end to end, from awarding and tiering to redemption and rewards lookup, including the services that customers and store associates rely on to get accurate loyalty information in the moment.

Technical Leadership

• Lead technical strategy and solution design for Loyalty Technology, ensuring solutions are scalable, reliable, secure, and aligned with business priorities across the loyalty platform.
• Own solutions that span multiple services and engineering workstreams, translating business, stakeholder, and technical requirements into simple, modular, and extensible designs.
• Lead design and code reviews to ensure quality, maintainability, extensibility, testability, and operational readiness of feature code.
• Apply, enforce, and improve Nordstrom engineering and security standards while contributing to the engineering community of practice.

Platform Ownership

• Design, build, and maintain high-performing services, APIs, and reusable components that support core loyalty capabilities, including earning, awarding, tiering, redemption, and rewards lookup.
• Improve reliability, performance, scalability, availability, observability, and security across test, integration, and production environments for loyalty services, including event-driven, Kafka-based pipelines.
• Plan and implement application enhancements, integrations, and reconfigurations — including integrations with our loyalty vendor and other third-party loyalty or promotions platforms — that improve functionality, resiliency, and usability.
• Build and improve automated tests, CI/CD practices, deployment procedures, and release processes that increase delivery confidence for loyalty services.
• Analyze defects, system performance, and operational bottlenecks across the loyalty platform to prevent recurrence and improve overall system stability.

AI-Native Practice

• Work AI-native by default across design, prototyping, coding, testing, debugging, and incident response — using AI tools to explore more solution paths and accelerate delivery, while framing problems and supplying the domain context that makes AI genuinely useful on complex loyalty work.
• Exercise strong engineering judgment over AI-generated output, taking full accountability for the correctness, security, performance, and maintainability of what ships, and favoring rapid prototyping and hands-on validation over heavyweight documentation.
• Help mature the team’s AI-native practices and mentor others on effective, responsible AI use — evaluating tools and workflows, sharing patterns that raise the whole squad’s leverage, and knowing when to rely on AI versus hands-on judgment.

Team & Culture

• Maintain a strong customer mindset for engineering partners and business users, balancing delivery needs with long-term maintainability and operational excellence.
• Participate in 24x7 on-call support and incident resolution for complex production issues impacting the loyalty program.
• Mentor engineers across a wide spectrum of technical activities and participate in interviews for individual contributor roles by providing clear, specific feedback.
• Lead by example through hands-on design, prototyping, coding, testing, and delivery of high-quality solutions.

What you’ll bring

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience in a relevant practice area.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience analyzing, designing, coding, testing, installing, and maintaining complex software programs.
• Strong knowledge of Java and the Java Spring Boot framework.
• Strong grasp of multiple technology stacks, including APIs, services, data stores, cloud infrastructure, and operational tooling.
• Experience with RESTful services, event-driven applications, and Kafka or similar event-streaming platforms.
• Experience with AWS or GCP services and cloud-native application development.
• Sound object-oriented design skills and knowledge of application design patterns.
• Experience working with diverse, collaborative, cross-functional teams across business, product, infrastructure, security, and engineering functions.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical information clearly to nontechnical audiences.
• Hands-on experience using AI tools in real engineering work, with the judgment to know when to lean on them and the discipline to verify what they produce.