Senior Manager, Engineering - Customer Identity (Hybrid - Seattle)

Nordstrom is seeking an experienced engineering leader to manage the Customer Identity team within our Enterprise Customer and Commerce organization. Customer Identity team is a foundational platform that defines how Nordstrom understands, unifies, and personalizes the customer experience across every channel — web, store, mobile, loyalty, and customer care.

In this role, you will lead a team of engineers responsible for the systems that store and surface Nordstrom's unified customer record: core identity, contact and address information, external identifier relationships, and the verification workflows that keep customer data accurate and trustworthy. You will partner closely with product, data, and other engineering teams to ensure the platform evolves in line with business strategy and delivers reliable, real-time customer data at scale.

The Ideal Candidate

You are a technically grounded leader who thrives at the intersection of data integrity, distributed systems, and cross-functional collaboration. You have experience building and operating high-availability, customer-facing data platforms — and you understand the outsized impact that clean, unified identity data has on personalization, loyalty, and customer trust. You are equally comfortable shaping long-term platform strategy and rolling up your sleeves to resolve a thorny architectural challenge with your team. You know how to align a diverse set of stakeholders around a shared data model, and you bring a track record of growing strong engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the ICON engineering team, which builds and maintains Nordstrom's unified customer identity platform — the authoritative source of customer core data across all channels and programs.
• Own the reliability, scalability, and correctness of systems that support real-time customer identification, verification workflows, and identity resolution across web, mobile, store, loyalty, and customer care.
• Drive the technical strategy for consolidating fragmented customer data from disparate sources (web, mobile apps, loyalty, store, customer care, etc) into a single, trusted customer record.
• Collaborate with stakeholders across channels to align platform capabilities with evolving business requirements and ensure seamless integration.
• Partner with data and analytics teams to ensure the unified customer record supports both operational and analytical use cases without compromising data quality or integrity.
• Champion engineering best practices including service reliability, API design, data consistency, and secure handling of personally identifiable information (PII).
• Allocate resources effectively across ongoing platform operations, new feature development, and strategic initiatives; ensure teams are set up for on-time, high-quality delivery.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement, collaboration, and professional growth across a team of full-time engineers and contract contributors.
• Manage vendor and partner relationships relevant to customer data enrichment and identity services.

Requirements

• 10+ years of engineering experience, with strong foundations in backend systems and data platforms.
• 5+ years in engineering leadership roles, managing and developing multi-disciplinary teams including both full-time and contract engineers.
• Bachelors Degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Data Science required.
• Experience building and operating high-availability, customer-facing platforms that handle real-time reads and writes at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to lead teams working on complex data modeling challenges — particularly around identity resolution, deduplication, or unified data records.
• Solid understanding of API design and service integration patterns, with experience coordinating platform changes across multiple consuming teams and channels.
• Familiarity with secure handling of customer PII, including data governance, access controls, and compliance considerations.
• Proven ability to manage cross-functional relationships and translate technical tradeoffs into clear guidance for product and business stakeholders.
• Experience leading both software developers and systems engineers in a collaborative, fast-moving environment.
• Strong communication skills — able to align diverse stakeholders around a shared technical vision and communicate platform capabilities and constraints clearly.
• Commitment to building inclusive, high-performing teams and promoting a culture of continuous improvement and professional development.

Nice to have:

• Experience with customer identity platforms.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and real-time data pipelines.
• Background in retail or e-commerce environments with multi-channel customer data complexity.