Principal, Software Engineer
Walmart · Posted Nov 4
Retail, e-commerce, grocery, pharmacy, and membership warehouse services
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About the role
GDF (Global Data Foundation) is part of Walmart's AI & Data organization, building foundational data platforms that power AI, analytics, and decision-making across Walmart banners and geographies. Its newly created platform team is building next-generation data infrastructure including reliable, high-throughput pipelines, distributed processing systems, and platform capabilities. This Principal Software Engineer role designs and operates distributed platform services and APIs, contributes to Spark-based data pipelines, and builds AI/GenAI and agentic platform capabilities with a strong reliability focus.
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 domain-oriented design, system design, and low-level design (LLD) rigor to ambiguous platform problems - evaluating dependencies, trade-offs, failure modes, scalability, cost, and long-term durability before writing a line of code.
- Flex into data engineering work when needed: contribute directly to Spark-based data pipelines and processing jobs, working comfortably 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 platform reliability, scalability, and observability - service-level objectives, distributed tracing, alerting, and incident response for services you build, with a strong Operational Excellence / Engineering Excellence discipline.
- Guide architecture and system design decisions across microservices, event-driven systems, and enterprise integrations, with an explicit eye toward how platform choices affect downstream data engineering workloads.
- Partner with data engineers, data scientists, and ML engineers to ensure platform services expose the right primitives for data pipelines, feature stores, and model-serving paths.
- Establish engineering standards through architecture reviews, design reviews, code reviews, and production readiness reviews for a team building process from scratch.
- As a Principal engineer, set technical direction and best practices across multiple teams and the broader GDF platform without needing a management title - mentor other engineers and influence GDF's broader platform engineering standards.
- Continuously evaluate emerging platform, cloud, and AI/agentic technologies, adopting them pragmatically where they improve reliability, productivity, or business value.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Genuinely hands-on coding: 12+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed platforms; strong proficiency in Java and Python is required - comfortable writing, reviewing, and debugging production code, not just directing others. 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.
- Deep experience with microservices architectures, distributed systems, event-driven patterns, API design, service contracts, and enterprise system integration - backed by strong system design, domain-oriented design (DDD), and low-level design (LLD) skills, with demonstrated ownership of production code and the judgment to evaluate trade-offs, failure modes, scalability, and cost.
- Deep understanding of cloud-native engineering practices - CI/CD, containerization, Kubernetes or equivalent orchestration, infrastructure automation, and production operations.
- Strong 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, not just integrate with it from a distance.
- 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.
- Strong knowledge of reliability engineering - observability, distributed tracing, logging, metrics, alerting, incident response, capacity planning, and fault tolerance for large-scale systems.
- Strong grounding in security, privacy, and enterprise engineering practices, including authentication, authorization, data protection, and secure API design.
- Proven ability to translate ambiguous technical/business problems into clear execution plans, particularly across a newly formed platform organization without fully established process.
- Strong ownership mindset and technical judgment; comfortable operating with high autonomy in a 0-to-1 environment.
- Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 5 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.
- Option 2: 7 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.
Benefits and support
- Incentive awards for performance
- Maternity and parental leave
- PTO
- Health benefits
About Walmart
Walmart Inc. is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores. As one of the world's largest companies by revenue, it serves millions of customers daily through physical stores and robust e-commerce platforms. The company is driven by a commitment to everyday low prices and an expanding suite of digital and convenience-focused services.
- Industry
- Retail
- Company size
- 2000000+ employees
- Founded
- 1962
- Location
- Bentonville, Arkansas, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Leadership
President and CEO
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Executive Vice President, Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer
Executive Vice President and Chief Growth Officer
President and CEO, Walmart U.S.
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