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

Nordstrom•Seattle, WA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

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. We're looking for a collaborative and forward-thinking Director of Engineering, PDLC Agents Platform to lead the strategy, development, and delivery of Nordstrom's agentic software delivery system — the platform that guides engineering teams from idea to shipped, production feature through named specialist digital worker agents (AI personas assigned to specific required gates in the delivery lifecycle, such as security, architecture, UX, process compliance, and SRE), persistent project memory, and enforced safety guardrails. 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. You'll work closely with stakeholders across not just the central AI organization but all engineering teams across Nordstrom as well as all business and technical context owners for various domains. This is a highly technical leadership role where you'll build technology and cultivate a culture of engineering rigor, safe experimentation, and continuous learning. Experience with building agentic systems involving evaluations and context engineering is a requirement. This role is offered as hybrid in Seattle, WA. Candidates must be available to work in office at the Nordstrom corporate headquarters a minimum of 4 days/week to be considered for this position.

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).
Have a strong technical background in agentic AI systems in production — coding agents, multi-agent orchestration, context engineering and agentic evaluations.
Understand build-time versus run-time governance trade-offs, and have designed or enforced policy-as-code controls in a regulated or high-stakes environment.
Are a 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.
Have a proven track record of hiring, mentoring, and growing engineering teams, with an ability to inspire and motivate others through a major platform migration.
Are passionate about using AI and agents to solve meaningful problems and create exceptional, trustworthy customer experiences.

Nice To Haves

Have 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.
Have experience in retail, e-commerce, or other customer-focused industries with PCI (Payment Card Industry) or PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data-handling requirements.

Responsibilities

Set the Vision: Define the strategy and roadmap for the PDLC Agents Platform, aligned to Nordstrom's AI-Native Operating Model and broader business and technology goals.
Build the Paved Road: 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.
Make Shipping a Real Gate: Own the platform's ship-time policy gate so no agent or change ships unless it's registered, instrumented, guardrail-wrapped, and eval-backed.
Collaborate Across Teams: 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.
Lead with Standards: 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.
Grow the Team: Build, mentor, and inspire a high-performing engineering team, and build a succession and talent pipeline of engineering managers and senior engineers.
Drive Operational Excellence: Establish best practices for the end-to-end agent lifecycle — build, ship, monitor, and retire — with an emphasis on scalability, security, and responsible autonomy.
Partner on Rollout: 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."