Senior Engineer 2, Inventory Visibility

Nordstrom•Seattle, WA

About The Position

The Enterprise Inventory Technology organization owns the systems that power inventory visibility, accuracy, and control across Nordstrom's Omnichannel retail network. Our platform provides a real-time, unified representation of inventory state, enabling stores, fulfillment centers, and enterprise stakeholders to make informed decisions about stock availability, movement, and allocation. We're also at the forefront of applying AI and agentic architectures to transform how inventory systems are built, tested, and operated. As a Senior Engineer 2 on this team, you'll work across the full stack, from high-throughput event processing and data infrastructure to the dashboards and operational UIs that put inventory intelligence in the hands of business users. You will also lead the next generation of AI-powered agents that automate the software development lifecycle and deliver intelligent capabilities directly to our end users.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong full-stack background.
Strong proficiency in Java and the Spring ecosystem (Spring Boot, Spring Framework, Spring Data) with experience building production-grade microservices.
Expertise with event-driven architectures and streaming platforms (e.g., Apache Kafka).
Solid understanding of relational and NoSQL data stores and the tradeoffs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance in distributed systems.
Experience building and operating production services in AWS or comparable cloud platforms.
Demonstrated experience building applications powered by large language models or agentic AI frameworks — including prompt engineering, tool use, orchestration patterns, and evaluation strategies.
Familiarity with AI-assisted development tooling and a strong point of view on how AI agents can accelerate design, coding, and testing workflows.
Strong communication skills and a collaborative approach to problem solving.

Nice To Haves

Experience in retail, supply chain, or inventory management domains.
Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, AWS Bedrock Agents, or similar orchestration platforms.
Experience building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines using vector databases (e.g., OpenSearch, Pinecone).
Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and DevOps best practices.
Track record of contributing to open-source projects or publishing technical content.

Responsibilities

Backend & Platform: Design, build, and maintain services that ingest, partition, and serve inventory state at scale using event streaming platforms, relational and NoSQL databases, and modern API frameworks.
Evolve the platform's data architecture — including partitioning strategies and event-driven pipelines — to support near-real-time inventory accuracy across a broad ecosystem of upstream and downstream systems.
Contribute to platform reliability through observability, alerting, incident response, and operational excellence practices.
Frontend & UX: Build and enhance operational dashboards and internal tools that surface inventory state, reconciliation insights, and exception workflows to store operations, supply chain, and loss prevention teams.
AI Agents & Intelligent Automation: Design and build AI agents that automate stages of the software development lifecycle, including design generation, code authoring, and test creation accelerating delivery velocity and scope, across the team.
Develop user-facing AI agents that surface actionable inventory insights, automate exception handling, and assist operational teams in real time.
Technical Leadership: Participate in design reviews, architecture discussions, and code reviews, raising the bar on engineering standards across the team.
Mentor junior and mid-level engineers; contribute to a culture of learning and technical growth.
Partner with product management and business stakeholders to translate inventory domain problems into well-scoped technical solutions.