Distinguished, Software Engineer

Walmart Walmart · Retail · Sunnyvale, CA

Distinguished Engineer to lead architectural evolution of W+ ecosystem, focusing on infrastructure, data science, and product execution for rapid experimentation and personalization at scale. Responsible for evaluating infrastructure ROI, defining architectural standards, designing scalable data pipelines, and managing the tech stack, including AI/MLOps tooling. Role emphasizes FinOps, cross-functional leadership, and mentorship.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define the architectural standards for the W+ ecosystem, ensuring that compute and storage costs are mapped directly to product performance and revenue-generating insights.
  2. Design and oversee the implementation of next-generation data pipelines capable of handling multi-petabyte scales while maintaining sub-second latency for critical BI dashboards.
  3. Evaluate and select our core tech stack (Cloud providers, Data Lakehouse architectures, AI/MLOps tooling) with a focus on long-term sustainability and avoiding vendor lock-in.
  4. Partner with the Executive Leadership Team to translate complex technical bottlenecks into business risks and opportunities.
  5. Set the "gold standard" for engineering excellence, fostering a culture of FinOps (Financial Operations) where engineers take pride in the efficiency of their code as much as its functionality.

Skills

Required

  • distributed systems
  • high-performance computing
  • large-scale data infrastructure
  • modern data stacks (e.g., Spark, Kubernetes, Snowflake/Databricks, Kafka)
  • Cloud providers
  • Data Lakehouse architectures
  • AI/MLOps tooling
  • FinOps
  • optimization of cloud spend
  • communication with executive leadership

Nice to have

  • Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
  • portfolio of industry-changing contributions

What the JD emphasized

  • 15+ years of experience
  • Architect or Distinguished titles
  • optimizing cloud spend ($50M+ annual budgets)
  • predict where the industry is moving over the next 3–5 years
  • explain to a CFO why a $2M investment in a specific infrastructure tier will result in a 10x ROI