Unlike most retailers, our e-commerce division operates on its own, and we have the agility (and capital budget) to move quickly and act on big opportunities. Yes, there's a lot of work and headache that's involved with dealing with massive retail systems, and they have about as much legacy stuff as you'd imagine a 150-year-old company with a history of giant acquisitions, but thankfully most of us never have to think about that stuff except at the edge of some giant diagram.
We have a whole bunch of floors in downtown SF that's just for dotcom--mostly engineers, some QA, some product/management, etc. We're reasonably up to date with new technologies--although we're a Java shop, some stuff gets done in Scala, there's an active Hadoop project, and lots of big, interesting problems in scalability, UX, big data, analytics, SEO, etc.
Example: I work on the internal-facing web product setup apps, primarily on product image stuff. Every product has to get photographed (including getting the physical sample from the manufacturer to the right studios, on the right model, etc), color corrected (we sell items in 60+ colors) mapped to products (is this the primary image? a swatch? a back view? which UPCs does it represent? what happens if the color sells out?). This all happens at scale: 130k physical samples trafficked, 150k products, 250k images.
Too bad this is on a weekend before new year's, otherwise I'd get all my favorite dev leaders in here to pitch you. We're growing (even in a down economy, we're posting significant growth year after year) and hiring like crazy (a current search shows 25 open FTE requisitions in SF, and our contract partners even more).
The work environment is a little BigCorp-ish, but it's relaxed (it's SF, after all), and they take work/life balance seriously, so if you're a hacker with a family you're definitely welcome here. I work with a lot of really smart people who get things done. Yes, we sell pants, but you get a 20% discount, and you get to find out when things go on sale beforehand ;)
Current openings: http://ecommerce.macysjobs.com/ Salaries are Bay-Area competitive, full benefits package, etc.
or if you want to know more you can contact me directly at joshua.wand@macys.com, with "Hacker News" in the subject.
NB going to bed now (11pm PST) but will be up in the morning to answer questions