Principal, Software Engineer

About the role

Position Summary...

What you'll do... We are looking for a highly experienced, hands-on Principal Software Engineer to architect and build large-scale, cloud-native distributed systems powering Walmart’s global fulfillment operations. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, high-throughput APIs, and SQL/NoSQL databases. The ideal candidate has a proven track record of designing, building, and scaling mission-critical backend platforms that handle complex, asynchronous workflows with high availability, reliability, and low latency. As a Principal Engineer, you will drive technical architecture across multiple engineering teams, solve complex distributed systems challenges, and remain actively involved in design, code reviews, performance optimization, and production troubleshooting.

About the Team

Walmart’s Global Integrated Fulfillment (GIF) platform powers critical eCommerce fulfillment operations across Walmart stores, including order processing, picking, staging, storage, packing, and dispense. Our engineering teams build and operate a complex ecosystem of interconnected microservices, real-time APIs, and event-driven workflows that orchestrate fulfillment across multiple systems. Our technology stack includes Java, Spring Boot, Apache Kafka, Microsoft Azure, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, REST APIs, and Kubernetes. We operate highly available, business-critical systems where performance, scalability, data consistency, and operational reliability directly impact store associates and millions of Walmart customers. This is an opportunity to solve challenging distributed systems problems at Walmart scale while influencing the architecture and technical direction of a major fulfillment platform.

What You’ll Do

- Architect large-scale distributed systems: Design and evolve highly available, fault-tolerant microservices and backend platforms supporting complex, high-volume fulfillment workflows.

- Build event-driven architectures: Design reliable asynchronous processing systems using Kafka or equivalent messaging technologies, addressing event ordering, delivery guarantees, idempotency, retries, duplicate processing, and failure recovery.

- Drive database architecture: Design and optimize data models and access patterns across relational and NoSQL databases, addressing partitioning, indexing, concurrency, consistency, and performance at scale.

- Solve complex distributed systems challenges: Address distributed transactions, eventual consistency, race conditions, concurrency, service dependencies, and resilience across interconnected services.

- Engineer for scale and performance: Optimize high-throughput, low-latency APIs and asynchronous workloads through performance profiling, capacity planning, load testing, and bottleneck analysis.

- Own production reliability: Drive observability, distributed tracing, SLOs, P95/P99 latency improvements, incident root-cause analysis, and architectural improvements that prevent recurring production issues.