Senior Principal Engineer – Inventory Network & Operations (Hybrid - Seattle)

Nordstrom•Seattle, WA

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

A Senior Principal Engineer at Nordstrom serves as a strategic technical consultant influencing enterprise-wide architecture and engineering practices. This role drives design trade-offs, solves systemic challenges, identifies industry trends for implementation, and ensures solutions are robust, scalable, and cost-effective. The Senior Principal Engineer shapes Nordstrom's technology landscape while maintaining a "One Nordstrom" perspective. We seek a Senior Principal Engineer to unify fragmented inventory systems through integration architecture and common inventory language, enabling near real-time operational visibility. You will oversee integration between physical (warehouse, store) and financial (RMS, ERP) systems while driving warehouse consolidation onto a single WMS platform and store inventory ownership migration. This role requires extensive collaboration across Product, Engineering, Merchandising, and Supply Chain teams to establish enterprise-wide inventory standards. A day in the life... Integration Architecture: Design and oversee integration layers between physical, financial, and operational inventory systems while leading critical transformations including warehouse unification on a single WMS platform and store inventory ownership migration, ensuring seamless data flow and consistency across all platforms. Multi-Owner Inventory Management: Establish architecture and data models that balance both 1st party (owned) and 3rd party (consignment, marketplace, drop-ship) inventory ownership across all systems, ensuring accurate tracking, reconciliation, and financial treatment for each ownership model. Common Inventory Language: Establish and drive adoption of standardized terminology and data models for inventory status, location, and movement across supply chain, merchandising, and store operations, collaborating with business and technical stakeholders to ensure organizational buy-in and consistent implementation. Near Real-Time Operational View: Architect solutions that synthesize data from multiple systems into a unified operational view, enabling real-time decision-making and serving as the foundation for inventory optimization across different ownership and fulfillment models. System Reconciliation: Create bidirectional integration patterns between inventory and financial systems to ensure data accuracy and alignment across physical and financial views, accounting for multiple ownership models and their distinct financial treatments. Technical Leadership: Drive inventory strategy and standards across the enterprise, mentor engineering teams, lead technical reviews for inventory initiatives, and influence cross-organizational design decisions to ensure consistent implementation of integration standards.

Requirements

Enterprise Experience: 15+ years of software engineering experience with enterprise-scale inventory systems and a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field.
Event-Driven Architecture: Deep expertise in event-driven architectures and real-time data integration patterns.
Information Modeling: Experience establishing common data models and standardized terminology across multiple technical and business domains.
System Integration: Proven ability to design integration layers that unify disparate inventory systems across supply chain, merchandising, finance, and store operations while building co sensus across diverse stakeholder groups.
Strategic Influence: Demonstrated ability to drive technical strategy, establish enterprise standards, and influence architectural decisions across multiple organizations through collaborative leadership and clear communication.
Solution Evaluation: Experience conducting build vs. buy analyses for enterprise systems, evaluating vendor solutions against integration requirements, and making recommendations that balance capability, cost, and architectural fit.
Platform Migration: Demonstrated success leading complex platform migrations while maintaining operational stability and minimizing business disruption.
Multi-Owner Inventory: Experience with complex inventory ownership models, including multi-party architectures or marketplace environments
Multi-Platform Architecture: Experience with enterprise WMS and inventory management platforms, preferably including Manhattan Active or Oracle systems (MFCS, SIM), with strong API and integration pattern expertise.
AI/ML & Automation: Familiarity with agentic systems and AI/ML applications for inventory optimization, auditing and predictive analytics in supply chain operations.

Responsibilities

Integration Architecture: Design and oversee integration layers between physical, financial, and operational inventory systems while leading critical transformations including warehouse unification on a single WMS platform and store inventory ownership migration, ensuring seamless data flow and consistency across all platforms.
Multi-Owner Inventory Management: Establish architecture and data models that balance both 1st party (owned) and 3rd party (consignment, marketplace, drop-ship) inventory ownership across all systems, ensuring accurate tracking, reconciliation, and financial treatment for each ownership model.
Common Inventory Language: Establish and drive adoption of standardized terminology and data models for inventory status, location, and movement across supply chain, merchandising, and store operations, collaborating with business and technical stakeholders to ensure organizational buy-in and consistent implementation.
Near Real-Time Operational View: Architect solutions that synthesize data from multiple systems into a unified operational view, enabling real-time decision-making and serving as the foundation for inventory optimization across different ownership and fulfillment models.
System Reconciliation: Create bidirectional integration patterns between inventory and financial systems to ensure data accuracy and alignment across physical and financial views, accounting for multiple ownership models and their distinct financial treatments.
Technical Leadership: Drive inventory strategy and standards across the enterprise, mentor engineering teams, lead technical reviews for inventory initiatives, and influence cross-organizational design decisions to ensure consistent implementation of integration standards.