Engineer 1: Agentic AI - Inventory Solutions (Hybrid - Seattle, WA)

Nordstrom is applying agentic AI to its inventory systems to investigate inventory problems, correlate signals, and take scoped action. The Engineer 1 builds and evaluates agent components for production inventory platforms, with guidance from senior engineers.

What you'll do:

• Implement individual components of agentic inventory solutions — tool integrations (Jira, Slack, Confluence, internal inventory APIs), prompt templates, and retrieval steps — under the direction of senior engineers, writing clean, well-tested code and documenting your work clearly
• Learn how the team applies context engineering — what an agent sees, when, and why — including how we ground agents in inventory context (audit records, ledger state, vendor data) so their answers are accurate and traceable
• Help build and run evaluation scripts and offline benchmarks to check that agent behavior is safe, accurate, and reliable — especially where inventory decisions carry financial implications
• Participate in on-call rotations and design reviews, learning to debug issues and surface trade-offs on the specific functions or components you own
• Add basic instrumentation — logging, metrics, alerts — to the systems you build, and follow Nordstrom's engineering and security standards, including secure handling of sensitive inventory and vendor data
• Collaborate across engineering, product, and business stakeholders to understand how your work fits into the larger inventory platform and where agentic AI can meaningfully reduce manual audit and reconciliation effort

What they're looking for:

• 1+ years of professional software engineering experience (internships count), or a relevant certification (e.g. bootcamp)
• Some hands-on exposure to LLMs or foundation model APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, etc.), whether through coursework, projects, internships, or professional experience
• Genuine curiosity about agentic AI — how agents use tools, retrieve context, and take actions — and a desire to build production skills in this space
• Solid CS fundamentals — data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented design — along with familiarity with RESTful APIs, JSON, and how services communicate with one another
• Basic understanding of software testing practices and version control (e.g. Git)
• Willingness to learn modern agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or the Claude Agent SDK
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, and a collaborative, feedback-seeking mindset
• Coursework, personal projects, or internship experience involving prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or vector databases
• Exposure to a backend language and framework such as Java / Spring Boot or Python, and to messaging middleware like Kafka
• Exposure to cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP, containerization (Docker / Kubernetes), and CI/CD basics
• Familiarity with backend databases (e.g. Spanner, Postgres)
• Interest or coursework in retail, e-commerce, supply chain, or inventory problem spaces

Benefits:

• Medical/vision and dental benefits
• Retirement benefits, including 401(k)
• Paid time away, including PTO accruals and holidays
• Life insurance and disability insurance/options
• Merchandise discount
• EAP resources
• May be eligible for performance-based incentives/bonuses
• Eligibility requirements may apply based on location, job level, classification, and length of employment.