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

Nordstrom Nordstrom · Retail · Seattle, WA

Senior Principal Engineer to unify fragmented inventory systems through integration architecture and common inventory language, enabling near real-time operational visibility. Oversees integration between physical and financial systems, drives warehouse consolidation, and manages store inventory ownership migration. Requires collaboration across Product, Engineering, Merchandising, and Supply Chain teams.

What you'd actually do

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

Skills

Required

  • 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.

Nice to have

  • Familiarity with agentic systems and AI/ML applications for inventory optimization, auditing and predictive analytics in supply chain operations.

What the JD emphasized

  • 15+ years of software engineering experience with enterprise-scale inventory systems