Principal, Software Engineer

Walmart Walmart · Retail · Crossman Excellence Building CA SUNNYVALE, Hoboken, NJ

Lead a team of 10+ engineers in designing and delivering a next-generation suite of measurement solutions for a multi-billion dollar advertising business at Walmart scale. This role involves defining technical direction, conducting design reviews, and partnering with data scientists, ML engineers, and product managers to solve AdTech problems using ML, statistical methods, and GenAI techniques, ensuring stability and correctness. The ideal candidate has 5+ years of experience in ML and data-intensive platform development, 2+ years as a staff-level technical lead, and familiarity with distributed systems. Experience in AdTech measurement, real-time streaming, and emerging GenAI patterns is a plus.

What you'd actually do

  1. Be the technical leader of 10+ engineers.
  2. Solve world class scale AdTech problems using ML and statistical methods together with a group talented engineers with doctoral degrees and industry experience in top-tier tech companies.
  3. Lead platform development for a suite of measurement solutions from 0 to 1— including incrementality, attribution, data cleanroom measurement, partner integrations, and GenAI-powered reporting — supporting both real-time optimization and offline reporting with the absolute stability and correctness demanded by Walmart's multi-billion-dollar digital advertising business.
  4. Define technical direction and conduct design reviews for engineering teams while partnering with engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders to align technical strategy with business goals.
  5. Troubleshoot business and production issues by gathering information (issue, impact, criticality, possible root cause), engage support teams to assist in resolution of issues, formulate an action plan, performing actions as designated in plan, interpret the results to determine further action, and complete online documentation.

Skills

Required

  • ML and data intensive platform development
  • Staff+ level technical lead experience
  • Distributed data processing tools and databases (e.g., Spark streaming, Flink, Kafka, RAY, BigQuery, Druid, Casandra)
  • Leveraging AI to enhance productivity and drive innovation
  • GenAI skills and techniques (e.g., MCP, RAG, Re-ranking, Agent Skill, Progressive disclosure, Context engineering, Agent-to-agent protocol, fine-tuning)
  • Prevailing ML libraries (e.g., pyspark, pytorch)
  • Implementing statistical and machine learning methods for data classification, regression, ranking, and/or recommendation
  • Working cross-functionally with data scientists, machine learning engineers, and product managers
  • AdTech experience with demonstrated knowledge of the AdTech business

Nice to have

  • PhD in data mining, data management, machine learning, operation research, GenAI, or statistics
  • Publications in top-tier academic conferences or journals
  • Ad-tech targeting, measurement, identity mapping, bidding, and optimization related domains
  • Extensive experience with real-time data streaming applications
  • Patents in data or machine learning related domains
  • Foundation knowledge in LLM (e.g., LoRA, transformer)
  • Good understanding of query optimization and distributed systems
  • Good understanding of industry trends in AdTech, ML, and GenAI

What the JD emphasized

  • 5+ years of experience in ML and data intensive platform development
  • 2+ years of experience as staff+ level technical lead

Other signals

  • GenAI-powered reporting
  • AdTech problems using ML
  • statistical methods
  • GenAI techniques
  • ML and data-intensive platform development