Senior Principal Engineer - Platform and SRE (Hybrid - Seattle)

A Senior Principal Engineer at Nordstrom serves as a strategic technical consultant across the entire organization, influencing enterprise-wide architecture and engineering practices. This role influences design trade-off decisions company-wide, solves complex endemic problems, identifies industry trends for implementation, and ensures all engineering solutions are exemplary in terms of robustness, stability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. The Sr. Principal Engineer represents the highest level of technical individual contributor in their organization, who shapes Nordstrom's technology landscape while maintaining a holistic "One Nordstrom" perspective. We are seeking a Sr. Principal Engineer to lead the continued evolution of the reliability and delivery bar for Nordstrom's CI/CD and cloud platform. The foundation is strong: the large majority of our deployable systems are containerized, run on a single standardized pipeline with mature canary capability, deploy continuously, ship immutable artifacts identified by digest, and are connected through a service mesh. Our next investments extend autonomous deployments into a full autonomous platform, bring in runtime scaling that anticipates business demand rather than reacting to it, and mature our multi-region posture. Underneath all of that, our SRE discipline is expanding quickly, and it builds what it runs on: reliability tooling, load and chaos harnesses, and production validation gating that holds every change to the standard before it reaches a customer. You will set the technical direction for Platform and SRE and make the operational bar easier to meet as you raise it, through intelligent systems that deliver more with greater efficiency. A day in the life... Own the north star architecture for cloud platform, CI/CD, and SRE, and hold a view that runs two to three years out, deliberately past the current product cycle. Establish the design principles that let teams make sound calls without needing you in the room. Identify where the platform limits the business before it surfaces as an incident or a missed date. Own the problems that sit between teams and lack clear ownership and carry them to a solution. Attach reliability targets to what the business does rather than to the services that happen to carry it. A single system often supports capabilities with different availability needs, and it is rarely worth building everything to the highest tier a system touches. Make deliberate degradation, where the most critical capabilities keep running, the expectation in design reviews.  Drive consensus on direction across Platform, SRE, Security, and the product and engineering teams that consume what we build. Make standards hold by enforcing them in the pipeline and in production validation gating, so everyone meets the same expectations. Resolve technical disagreement without being divisive. Guide design reviews inside and outside your own organization and set SRE up to do the same at scale, so delivered systems match the design that was agreed. When reality argues against a standard, change the standard. Identify the industry trends and emerging capabilities worth adopting, and decide which ones Nordstrom should move on now, wait on, or skip entirely. Separate documented production practice from vendor claims and conference aspiration. Act as a technical decision maker during significant incidents regardless of which systems are involved, and turn what those incidents teach into platform defaults, not one-team fixes. Mentor principal and senior engineers across the organization, encourage open technical debate, and help teams think past the problem currently in front of them. Serve as a trendsetter in hiring for senior technical roles. Represent Nordstrom's platform engineering externally. You own this if you have... 15+ years of professional software or infrastructure engineering experience and a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer