Distinguished, Software Engineer

Walmart•Sunnyvale, CA

8d•Onsite

About The Position

The Distinguished Software Engineer is the senior-most technical leader for Walmart International Search & Personalization, accountable for the architecture, technical strategy, and engineering bar of the discovery platforms that serve customers across Canada, Mexico, Chile, and other global markets. This role defines the multi-year technical vision for AI-native search and personalization, spanning data pipelines, retrieval, ranking, recommendations, and generative and agentic experiences, and ensures these systems scale reliably across markets, languages, and catalogs. Operating as a force multiplier, the Distinguished Engineer shapes the direction of Principal engineers and engineering leaders, resolves the hardest cross-cutting architectural problems, and represents international discovery in enterprise technical forums across Walmart Global Tech. The role combines deep hands-on technical judgment with business acumen, translating customer and market outcomes into durable platform investments. This leader embodies Walmart's values of respect, integrity, and continuous learning while raising the technical ambition of the entire organization. About the team: Walmart International Search & Personalization builds the intelligent discovery experiences that help millions of customers find, compare, and engage with products across global markets. The organization spans ML Engineering, Data Science, Data Operations, and Platform Engineering, owning the full discovery ecosystem: signal and catalog data pipelines, feature and dataset delivery, query understanding, semantic and hybrid retrieval, learning to rank, multi-tenant recommendations, personalization, experimentation, and scalable ML/AI infrastructure. Our platforms are designed to be multi-market by default, supporting diverse languages, assortments, and customer behaviors from a shared foundation. Engineers here tackle hard problems in distributed systems, large-scale machine learning, and generative AI, and the team is moving decisively toward AI-native, agentic discovery. We value technical depth, data-driven decisions, rigorous experimentation, and the collaboration required to turn research-grade ideas into production systems that measurably improve customer engagement and business outcomes.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in the design and development of highly scalable distributed applications and platforms.
Distinguished track record architecting and operating large-scale, cloud-native distributed systems for search, recommendations, personalization, or ads serving hundreds of millions of users.
Proven ability to set technical direction across multiple teams and organizations, influencing without authority and driving adoption of shared architectures and standards.
Demonstrated success developing senior technical talent and elevating engineering practices across a large organization.
Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to distill complex technical strategy into clear business narratives for executives and deep technical guidance for engineers.
Technical expertise: Search and retrieval: Deep hands-on experience with semantic and hybrid search engines such as Vespa, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Solr, including tensor ranking, multi-phase ranking, and combining lexical (BM25) with dense vector retrieval.
Vector search and embeddings: Approximate nearest neighbor techniques (HNSW, IVF, product quantization) and libraries such as FAISS, ScaNN, or Milvus; dense and late-interaction retrieval models such as bi-encoders, two-tower models, and ColBERT; multilingual embedding models for cross-market search.
Ranking and relevance: Learning to rank with LambdaMART, XGBoost, or LightGBM; neural and cross-encoder rerankers; query understanding including intent classification, query rewriting, spell correction, and entity recognition; relevance evaluation using NDCG, MRR, and human judgment programs.
Recommendations and personalization: Candidate generation and ranking architectures, sequential and session-based models (SASRec, BERT4Rec, transformers), graph-based recommenders, real-time user and context features, and contextual bandits for explore and exploit.
Generative and agentic AI: Production experience with LLMs for query understanding, conversational and agentic shopping, and content generation; retrieval-augmented generation; fine-tuning (LoRA, distillation); LLM serving and optimization with vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or Triton; agent frameworks such as LangGraph; and rigorous LLM evaluation, guardrails, and cost management.
ML platforms and MLOps: PyTorch and TensorFlow; distributed training with Ray or Horovod; feature stores such as Feast; model lifecycle tooling such as MLflow, Kubeflow, or Vertex AI; low-latency online inference and model monitoring for drift and quality.
Data engineering: Batch and streaming pipelines with Spark, Kafka, and Flink; orchestration with Airflow; lakehouse and warehouse platforms such as BigQuery, Delta Lake, or Iceberg; data quality, lineage, and SLA ownership.
Experimentation: Large-scale A/B testing, interleaving for ranking evaluation, variance reduction techniques such as CUPED, and online and offline metric alignment.
Infrastructure and languages: Kubernetes, containerized microservices, and cloud platforms (Azure, GCP, or AWS); CI/CD, observability, and resilience engineering; strong programming skills in Python, Java, Scala, Go, or C++.
Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 6 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.
Option 2: 8 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.

Nice To Haves

Multi-market platforms: Experience building multi-tenant or multi-market systems, including multilingual search, localization, and market-specific catalog and assortment handling, is highly valued.
Master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 4 years' experience in software engineering or related area
We value candidates with a background in creating inclusive digital experiences, demonstrating knowledge in implementing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standards, assistive technologies, and integrating digital accessibility seamlessly.
The ideal candidate would have knowledge of accessibility best practices and join us as we continue to create accessible products and services following Walmart’s accessibility standards and guidelines for supporting an inclusive culture.

Responsibilities

Define and own the multi-year technical strategy and reference architecture for International Search & Personalization, aligning data, ML, and platform investments to business and customer outcomes across markets.
Architect the next generation of AI-native discovery, including LLM-powered query understanding, semantic and hybrid retrieval, generative and agentic shopping experiences, and real-time personalization, balancing quality, latency, and cost at global scale.
Set the architectural direction for multi-tenant, multi-market platforms so new markets, languages, and use cases launch on shared foundations rather than bespoke builds.
Establish organization-wide engineering standards for system design, ML lifecycle and MLOps, data quality and lineage, model evaluation, responsible AI, observability, and resilience, and hold the bar through architecture and design reviews.
Lead resolution of the most complex cross-cutting technical challenges, including critical incidents, performance and cost bottlenecks, and platform modernization, driving root cause to systemic fixes.
Mentor and grow Principal and Senior engineers, building a deep technical leadership bench and a culture of craftsmanship, experimentation, and continuous learning.
Partner with engineering, product, data science, and business leaders to shape roadmaps, frame build versus buy and platform versus product decisions and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to executive audiences.
Represent Walmart International in enterprise architecture forums, influence shared Walmart Global Tech platforms, and contribute to Walmart's external technical reputation through patents, publications, and industry engagement.

Benefits

Competitive pay
Performance-based bonus awards
Medical coverage
Vision coverage
Dental coverage
401(k)
Stock purchase
Company-paid life insurance
PTO (including sick leave)
Parental leave
Family care leave
Bereavement leave
Jury duty leave
Voting leave
Short-term disability
Long-term disability
Company discounts
Military Leave Pay
Adoption expense reimbursement
Surrogacy expense reimbursement
PTO and/or PPTO that can be used for vacation, sick leave, holidays, or other purposes.
Live Better U is a Walmart-paid education benefit program for full-time and part-time associates in Walmart and Sam's Club facilities. Programs range from high school completion to bachelor's degrees, including English Language Learning and short-form certificates. Tuition, books, and fees are completely paid for by Walmart.