Staff Data Scientist- Mle – Recommendations & Personalization

Walmart Walmart · Retail · Sunnyvale, CA

Staff engineer to architect and lead the feature engineering ecosystem for large-scale recommendation and personalization systems. This role owns feature strategy, platform design, and cross-team alignment, while remaining hands-on for high-impact systems.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design the end-to-end feature architecture supporting candidate generation, ranking, and re-ranking
  2. Lead the design and evolution of feature stores (offline + online) optimized for recsys workloads
  3. Define standards for feature versioning, lineage, freshness SLAs, and point-in-time correctness
  4. Architect systems supporting real-time, near-real-time, and batch features
  5. Drive feature engineering best practices across multiple recommendation teams

Skills

Required

  • 4+ years in data engineering, ML engineering, or recsys platform roles
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems and large-scale data processing
  • Proven experience architecting feature platforms for recommendation systems
  • Strong understanding of ranking architectures, candidate generation, and personalization patterns
  • Exceptional technical communication and leadership skills

What the JD emphasized

  • feature engineering ecosystem
  • recommendation and personalization systems
  • feature stores
  • recsys workloads
  • feature observability
  • drift detection
  • model health
  • ranking quality

Other signals

  • recommendation systems
  • personalization
  • feature engineering
  • large-scale systems