Staff Software Engineer
Walmart
Staff Software Engineer
Walmart
Sells groceries and essentials in stores and online
About Team
GDF (Global Data Foundation) is part of Walmart's AI & Data organization - the team building the foundational data platforms that power AI, analytics, and decision-making across every Walmart banner and geography, from supply chain and merchandising to customer experience and enterprise AI agents. Our newly created platform team is chartered with building next-generation data infrastructure at Walmart scale: reliable, high-throughput data pipelines, distributed processing systems, and platform capabilities that downstream teams across Walmart depend on every day.
What You'll 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.
What You'll Bring
• 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.
About Walmart Global Tech
Imagine working in an environment where one line of code can make life easier for hundreds of millions of people. That's what we do at Walmart Global Tech. We're a team of software engineers, data scientists, cybersecurity experts, and service professionals within the world's leading retailer who make an epic impact and are at the forefront of the next retail disruption. People are why we innovate, and people power our innovations. We are people-led and tech-empowered.
Benefits
Beyond our great compensation package, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include a host of best-in-class benefits - maternity and parental leave, PTO, health benefits, and much more. Walmart's culture sets us apart, and we know being together helps us innovate, learn, and grow great careers. This role is based in our [Bangalore/Chennai] office for daily work, with the flexibility for associates to manage their personal lives.
Belonging
We aim to create a culture where every associate feels valued for who they are, rooted in respect for the individual. Our goal is to foster a sense of belonging, to create opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers, and to be a Walmart for everyone. At Walmart, our vision is "everyone included." By fostering a workplace culture where everyone is - and feels - included, everyone wins.
Equal Opportunity Employer
Walmart, Inc., is an Equal Opportunities Employer - By Choice. We believe we are best equipped to help our associates, customers and the communities we serve live better when we really know them. That means understanding, respecting and valuing unique styles, experiences, identities, ideas and opinions while being inclusive of all people.
Outlined below are the required minimum qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no minimum qualifications.
Minimum Qualifications:Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 4 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.Option 2: 6 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.Outlined below are the optional preferred qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no preferred qualifications.
Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computer Information Systems, Software Engineering, or related area and 2 years' experience in software engineering or related areaWalmart sells groceries, household essentials, clothing, and electronics through stores and online marketplaces for consumers around the world. Its everyday low price model combines large purchasing volumes with distribution networks that move goods to stores and customer homes. Shoppers can browse online, collect orders at a nearby store, or request delivery, while third-party merchants use its marketplace and fulfillment services to reach customers. The group earns revenue from merchandise sales, memberships, advertising, and services, and also operates pharmacies, optical centers, and digital payments businesses. Walmart opened its first discount store in 1962 and is headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas.
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