Job Description

ABOUT THE TEAM AND THE ROLE

Nordstrom runs on knowing what inventory it has, where it is, and whether the record can be trusted. The Inventory Integration Systems team owns that truth across a multi-market, multi-channel business — the platforms that track in-transit inventory, reconcile audits, capture vendor data, and keep enterprise inventory accurate for every downstream system that depends on it.

We are now applying agentic AI to that mission. Across platforms like AURA (audit unification using RAG-based AI), IAP (Inventory Audit Platform), OmniTrace (in-transit dashboard and ledger), and our PADLC agent pipeline, we're building agents that don't just report on inventory problems — they investigate them, correlate signals, and take scoped action. This is applied AI on a real, high-stakes retail domain, not a research sandbox.

As an Engineer 1, you are an early-in-career individual contributor building your foundation in agentic AI engineering on top of production inventory systems. You'll work under the guidance of senior engineers on well-scoped units of work — implementing agent components, writing tests, and learning how production agentic systems are designed, evaluated, and operated inside a large enterprise. This is a great role for someone early in their career who is curious about applied AI, excited to grow into a full agentic solutions engineer, and interested in the retail supply-chain and inventory problem space.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

• 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.

YOU OWN THIS IF YOU HAVE…

Must Have

• 1+ years of professional software engineering experience (internships count), or a relevant certification (e.g. bootcamp).

• AI Fluency  Required   — 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.

Nice to Have

• 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.

• Any contributions to open-source AI projects or personal experimentation with LLM applications.

Pay Range Details

The pay range(s) below has been provided in compliance with state specific laws. Pay ranges may be different for other locations. 
Pay offers are dependent on the location, as well as job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

We’ve got you covered…

Our employees are our most important asset and that’s reflected in our benefits. Nordstrom is proud to offer a variety of benefits to support employees and their families, including:

• Medical/Vision, Dental, Retirement and Paid Time Away
• Life Insurance and Disability
• Merchandise Discount and EAP Resources

A few more important points...

The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It’s not all-inclusive. There may be additional duties, responsibilities and qualifications for this job.

For Los Angeles or San Francisco applicants: Nordstrom is required to inform you that we conduct background checks after conditional offer and consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with legal requirements per Los Angeles, Cal. Muni. Code 189.04 and the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. For additional state and location specific notices, please refer to the Legal Notices document within the FAQ section of the Nordstrom Careers site.

Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation should contact the nearest Nordstrom location, which can be identified at www.nordstrom.com. 

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