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 distributed platform services and APIs using Java and Python, applied

against Kubernetes or equivalent cloud-native infrastructure.

• Apply domain-oriented design, system design, and low-level design (LLD) rigor to ambiguous platform

problems - evaluating dependencies, trade-offs, failure modes, scalability, cost, and long-term

durability before writing a line of code.

• Flex into data engineering work when needed: contribute directly to Spark-based data pipelines and

processing jobs, working comfortably in GDF's data engineering codebase alongside platform work.

• Build AI, GenAI, and agentic-powered platform capabilities: intelligent developer tooling, workflow

automation, agentic services, and AI-assisted operational tooling (monitoring, incident triage, capacity

planning).

• Own platform reliability, scalability, and observability - service-level objectives, distributed tracing,

alerting, and incident response for services you build, with a strong Operational Excellence /

Engineering Excellence discipline.

• Guide architecture and system design decisions across microservices, event-driven systems, and

enterprise integrations, with an explicit eye toward how platform choices affect downstream data

engineering workloads.

• Partner with data engineers, data scientists, and ML engineers to ensure platform services expose the

right primitives for data pipelines, feature stores, and model-serving paths.

• Establish engineering standards through architecture reviews, design reviews, code reviews, and

production readiness reviews for a team building process from scratch.

• 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 platform engineering standards.

• Continuously evaluate emerging platform, cloud, and AI/agentic technologies, adopting them

pragmatically where they improve reliability, productivity, or business value.