STAFF, SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Walmart Global Tech · Posted Oct 31
Software development, cloud infrastructure, and retail technology services for Walmart
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About the role
GDF (Global Data Foundation) is part of Walmart's AI & Data organization and builds foundational data platforms that power AI, analytics, and decision-making across Walmart's banners and geographies. The newly created platform team is building next-generation data infrastructure, including reliable high-throughput data pipelines, distributed processing systems, and platform capabilities. This Staff Software Engineer role will design, build, and operate distributed platform services and APIs using Java and Python on Kubernetes, with work spanning Spark data pipelines, AI/GenAI/agentic capabilities, and reliability engineering.
What you will do
- Design, build, and operate distributed platform services and APIs using Java and Python, applied against Kubernetes or equivalent cloud-native infrastructure.
- Apply system design and low-level design (LLD) rigor to platform problems - evaluating dependencies, trade-offs, failure modes, scalability, and cost before writing a line of code, with support from Staff/Principal engineers on the most ambiguous or cross-team problems.
- Flex into data engineering work when needed: contribute to Spark-based data pipelines and processing jobs, working directly in GDF's data engineering codebase alongside platform work.
- Build AI, GenAI, and agentic-powered platform capabilities: intelligent developer tooling, workflow automation, agentic services, and AI-assisted operational tooling (monitoring, incident triage, capacity planning).
- Own reliability, scalability, and observability for the services you build - service-level objectives, distributed tracing, alerting, and incident response - with a strong Operational Excellence / Engineering Excellence discipline.
- Contribute to architecture and system design decisions across microservices, event-driven systems, and enterprise integrations, with an eye toward how platform choices affect downstream data engineering workloads.
- Partner with data engineers, data scientists, and ML engineers to ensure the services you own expose the right primitives for data pipelines, feature stores, and model-serving paths.
- Participate actively in architecture reviews, design reviews, code reviews, and production readiness reviews for a team building process from scratch.
- As a Senior engineer, bring strong technical judgment to design and code reviews within your immediate team and area of ownership, mentor early-career engineers, and help raise the bar for engineering quality - without needing a formal management title.
- Stay current on emerging platform, cloud, and AI/agentic technologies, and propose where they could pragmatically improve reliability, productivity, or business value within your team's scope.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Genuinely hands-on coding: 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating distributed platforms; strong proficiency in Java and Python is required - comfortable writing, reviewing, and debugging production code. Additional experience with Go, C++, or Scala is a plus.
- Operational Excellence (OE) and Engineering Excellence (EE) mindset is a required skill, not a nice-to-have: SLO/SLA ownership, incident management and blameless post-incident reviews, proactive reliability and quality metrics, and continuous improvement built into how you ship, not bolted on afterward.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Solid experience with microservices architectures, distributed systems, event-driven patterns, API design, service contracts, and enterprise system integration - backed by solid system design and low-level design (LLD) skills, with demonstrated ownership of production code and the judgment to evaluate trade-offs, failure modes, scalability, and cost for the components you own.
- Solid understanding of cloud-native engineering practices - CI/CD, containerization, Kubernetes or equivalent orchestration, infrastructure automation, and production operations.
- Working exposure to Big Data / data engineering technologies - Spark required at a working level, with familiarity in Hadoop/HDFS, Hive, or Kafka - enough to flex into data engineering work confidently.
- Full exposure to AI and Agentic technologies: hands-on experience integrating model APIs and GenAI/LLM tooling, building or operating agentic workflows (tool-calling agents, multi-step autonomous systems), working with embeddings/vector search, and applying MLOps practices (feature stores, model lifecycle, retraining pipelines) - not just conceptual awareness.
- Solid knowledge of reliability engineering - observability, distributed tracing, logging, metrics, alerting, incident response, capacity planning, and fault tolerance for large-scale systems.
- Solid grounding in security, privacy, and enterprise engineering practices, including authentication, authorization, data protection, and secure API design.
- Proven ability to translate reasonably well-scoped technical/business problems into clear execution plans, particularly within a newly formed team - escalating cross-team ambiguity to Staff/Principal engineers as needed.
- Strong ownership mindset and technical judgment; comfortable operating with autonomy within your team in a 0-to-1 environment.
Benefits and support
- Incentive awards for performance
- Maternity and parental leave
- PTO
- Health benefits
About Walmart Global Tech
Walmart Global Tech is the technological powerhouse and engineering arm of Walmart Inc., responsible for building and managing foundational technologies, cloud infrastructure, and software systems. The organization powers global retail operations across Walmart U.S., Sam's Club, and Walmart International, delivering customer experiences and enterprise services worldwide. Operating across multiple global hubs, it unites engineering, data science, product design, and artificial intelligence to digitally transform retail.
- Industry
- Information Technology
- Company size
- 25000+ employees
- Founded
- 2011
- Location
- Bentonville, Arkansas, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Leadership
Executive Vice President, Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer
Executive Vice President, AI Acceleration, Product and Design
Senior Vice President and Tech Operating Partner, Walmart International
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