Staff, Data Scientist

Walmart Walmart · Retail · Bangalore, KA, India

Staff Data Scientist focused on International eCommerce Personalization at Walmart. The role involves defining long-term technical strategy, ML architecture, and scientific standards for personalization systems. Key responsibilities include architecting next-generation personalization ML systems, solving complex personalization science problems (e.g., multi-objective ranking, cross-session personalization, LLM integration), establishing scientific rigor, driving cross-functional strategy, and mentoring other data scientists. The role operates at scale, impacting hundreds of millions of users.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define and drive personalization technical strategy: Own the multi-year scientific and architectural roadmap for Walmart's international personalization platform — identifying the most impactful investments in model architecture, data infrastructure, experimentation capability, real-time systems, and AI/ML tooling, and making the case for them at the Director and VP level across Data Science, Engineering, and Product.
  2. Architect next-generation personalization systems: Lead the design of the end-to-end personalization ML architecture — including candidate generation and retrieval, multi-stage ranking, contextual personalization, real-time feature computation, feedback loops, and model governance — ensuring the system is scalable, low-latency, resilient, privacy-compliant, and adaptable across diverse international markets.
  3. Solve the hardest personalization science problems: Take on the most ambiguous and technically complex challenges across the personalization stack: multi-objective ranking under business constraints, cross-session and cross-channel personalization, cold start at scale, causal inference for long-horizon customer outcomes, transfer learning and market adaptability, and the integration of large language models into production personalization workflows.
  4. Establish scientific rigor and standards across the discipline: Define and champion the standards for experimentation design, offline evaluation, model validation, incrementality measurement, and responsible ML across the personalization team and adjacent science teams — building shared frameworks, tooling, and review processes that improve quality and velocity organization-wide.
  5. Drive cross-functional strategy and organizational alignment: Serve as the primary technical voice of personalization science in cross-functional planning with Engineering, Product, Merchandising, Marketing, UX, Legal, and Analytics — translating complex scientific findings, system tradeoffs, and long-horizon research into strategic recommendations that shape product roadmaps, engineering investments, and business priorities.

Skills

Required

  • PhD in Machine Learning, Statistics, Computer Science, Operations Research, or related field, or 12+ years of equivalent industry experience
  • 8+ years of hands-on data science or ML research experience
  • Significant depth in ecommerce personalization, recommender systems, search ranking, customer targeting, or real-time decisioning
  • Track record of delivering systems that operate at the scale of hundreds of millions of users in production
  • Ability to define and execute multi-year technical roadmaps for complex ML systems
  • Authority and communication skills to align engineering, product, and business stakeholders on long-horizon technical investments
  • Mastery of the full personalization and recommendation system stack
  • Deep learning retrieval and ranking expertise

Nice to have

  • Mentorship of Senior and Principal Data Scientists
  • Representing technical thinking to external research and industry communities
  • Publications, conference presentations, patent filings

What the JD emphasized

  • Define and drive the long-term technical strategy
  • ML architecture
  • scientific standards
  • highest-leverage problems
  • novel model architectures
  • system-level experimentation frameworks
  • multi-market adaptability
  • responsible AI at scale
  • end-to-end personalization ML architecture
  • scalable, low-latency, resilient, privacy-compliant
  • most ambiguous and technically complex challenges
  • multi-objective ranking
  • cross-session and cross-channel personalization
  • cold start at scale
  • causal inference
  • transfer learning and market adaptability
  • integration of large language models into production personalization workflows
  • experimentation design
  • offline evaluation
  • model validation
  • incrementality measurement
  • responsible ML
  • multi-year technical roadmaps
  • hundreds of millions of users in production
  • deep learning retrieval and ranking

Other signals

  • personalization
  • recommendation systems
  • large-scale ML systems
  • multi-market adaptability
  • responsible AI