Principal Engineer - Store Selling & Customer Experience (Hybrid - Seattle)

Job Description

Join us in revolutionizing Nordstrom's in-store customer experience through cutting-edge technology. We're modernizing our store selling technology stack and building next-generation capabilities that seamlessly connect digital and physical retail. As Principal Engineer, you'll lead the technical strategy for point-of-sale systems, clienteling tools, and omnichannel platforms that define how customers and store teams interact during the shopping experience.

What You'll Do

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Architect scalable, reliable store selling and transaction solutions serving hundreds of stores and processing millions of customer transactions
• Lead the technical vision for our point-of-sale ecosystem, driving next-generation capabilities while ensuring performance, security, and exceptional user experiences
• Design systems enabling seamless omnichannel customer journeys that integrate selling empowerment tools with in-store experiences
• Make key architectural decisions spanning selling, clienteling, and transaction domains that shape the future of store technology

Operational Excellence & Innovation

• Champion operational excellence through improvements in observability, telemetry, monitoring, and automation
• Drive technical excellence across engineering teams, establishing best practices for distributed systems, real-time transaction processing, payment security, and system resilience
• Leverage AI and machine learning to optimize transaction processing, personalize customer experiences, and enable predictive capabilities across store operations
• Utilize AI-powered development tools (e.g. Claude) to accelerate code development, improve code quality, and enhance team productivity.
• Stay current with advances in retail technology, payment systems, customer experience platforms, and AI-driven retail innovation

Collaboration & Mentorship

• Partner with product, store operations, customer experience, merchandising, and business stakeholders to deliver impactful solutions
• Provide technical leadership as an individual contributor, mentoring senior engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and architectural guidance
• Guide teams in adopting AI-assisted development practices and establishing best practices for AI tool integration in the development lifecycle
• Collaborate with platform and enterprise services teams to ensure cohesive integration across the technology ecosystem

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 8+ years in software engineering with significant focus on retail systems, distributed architectures, or customer-facing applications
• 3+ years of technical leadership as an individual contributor, influencing engineering teams in high-scale retail or e-commerce environments
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master's preferred, or equivalent experience)

Technical Expertise

• Deep expertise in transaction processing systems, point-of-sale architecture, payment processing, and real-time financial systems
• Strong background in distributed systems design, microservices architectures, event-driven systems, and high-volume transaction workloads
• Experience with cloud platforms and modern technology stacks for building resilient, scalable applications
• Proficiency in leveraging AI coding assistants to accelerate development workflows, from code generation to testing and documentation.
• Strong programming skills with ability to make trade-off decisions at multiple system levels
• Network resilience patterns, offline mode capabilities, and data synchronization strategies

Domain Knowledge

• Regulatory compliance expertise: PCI-DSS, payment security, and data privacy
• Proven track record building production-grade systems with 99.95%+ uptime
• Deep commitment to operational excellence: observability tools, automated testing, deployment automation, and proactive monitoring
• Customer-focused mindset with ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions

Leadership & Communication

• Strong mentoring capabilities with track record of developing engineers' technical skills
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholde