Nordstrom Brings On Former Amazon Exec

If Nordstrom is looking to strengthen its eCommerce capabilities, the retailer certainly looked to the right place in a recent hire.

Chain Store Age reports that the luxury retail chain has named as its CTO, Kumar Srinivasan, previously of Amazon — where he served as vice president of Amazon Web Services from 2005–2008, then as general manager of Amazon Payments from 2008–2010.

In announcing Srinivasan’s hiring, shares CSA, Nordstrom highlighted its new CTO’s experience developing “highly innovative customer-focused outcomes” and cloud expertise.

With Nordstrom, Srinivasan — who, following his tenure at Amazon, served as the CTO of consumer-generated content platform Bazaarvoice from 2011–2012 and chief product and technology officer of the social commerce site Lockerz.com from 2010–2011 — will be tasked with reducing complexity, while optimizing engineering and software productivity and effectiveness across four technology teams covering the areas of service and experience, loyalty and marketing, engineering and supply chain initiatives, notes CSA.

“We’re bringing Kumar to Nordstrom at an important time, as we are positioning our technology organization to better support our long-term growth plans,” said Dan Little, CIO of Nordstrom, in a statement shared by the outlet. “Kumar’s extensive experience in strategy, product development and delivering technology solutions that support a great user experience, as well as his passion for the customer, will be invaluable.”

CSA shares that Srinivasan being brought in as Nordstrom’s CTO is in keeping with the retailer’s previously stated goal to reduce its number of IT projects, while making them more meaningful, as the company is currently in the midst of an organizational restructuring related to that focus, having laid off at least 130 IT staff members in the past month.