PRINCIPAL, SOFTWARE ENGINEER

About the role

Position Summary...

What you'll do...

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 large-scale batch and streaming data pipelines using Spark, Java, and Python, processing data at Walmart scale.

• Apply strong software engineering fundamentals - clean architecture, automated testing, CI/CD, code review discipline - to data engineering work; this is a software engineering role that specializes in data, not a script-writing role.

• Apply domain-oriented design, system design, and low-level design (LLD) rigor to ambiguous data and platform problems - evaluating dependencies, trade-offs, failure modes, scalability, cost, and long-term durability before writing a line of code.

• Flex into platform/software engineering work when needed: build and maintain services, APIs, and distributed systems that data pipelines depend on, contributing directly to GDF's broader platform codebase.

• Integrate AI, GenAI, and agentic capabilities directly into the data platform: embeddings/vector search for data discovery, LLM-assisted data quality and anomaly detection, agentic pipeline monitoring and self-healing, AI-assisted schema and lineage documentation.

• Partner with data scientists and ML engineers to build feature pipelines, model-serving data paths, and the data infrastructure that MLOps depends on.

• Own data quality, observability, and governance for the pipelines and datasets you build, with a strong Operational Excellence / Engineering Excellence discipline.

• Participate in and lead architecture and design reviews spanning both data engineering and platform engineering domains.

• As a Principal engineer, set technical direction and best practices across multiple teams and the broader GDF platform without needing a management title - mentor other engineers and influence GDF's broader data engineering standards.

• Continuously evaluate emerging Big Data, cloud, and AI/agentic technologies, adopting them pragmatically where they improve reliability, productivity, or business value.

What You'll Bring

• Genuinely hands-on coding: 12+ years of professional software engineering experience with significant hands-on data engineering at scale; strong proficiency in Java and Python is required, and strong working knowledge of Spark for distributed data processing is required, not optional. Additional experience with Go, C++, or Scala is a plus.