Manager, Automation Engineering

Walmart • Bentonville, AR

18h • $90,000 - $180,000

About The Position

Join Walmart’s Accelerated Pickup & Delivery (APD) team to help transform back-of-store fulfillment through automation. This role focuses on scaling and optimizing our 30K automation initiative, where robotic systems support digital order fulfillment and help shape the future of retail. As Manager, Automation Engineering – Performance, Insights & Tools, you will own automation performance management across systems, sites, and vendors while partnering closely with operations, product, data, and external partners. You will help define automation potential and acceptance criteria for new systems, identify and quantify performance loss opportunities, support structured root-cause analysis and test-and-learn improvements, and build associate-facing and insight tools that maximize system performance. This role is critical to ensuring the 30K automation initiative runs at peak system performance, uptime, and pick rate while solving one of retail’s most important challenges: efficient, scalable store fulfillment. The work is highly hands-on and blends automation engineering, data analysis, KPI definition, investigative problem solving, and tool building to help teams understand where performance is being lost and what actions will improve it.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering (Industrial, Mechanical, Systems, Computer Science, Electrical, or related field) or Degrees in Data Science, Analytics, Statistics, Business Math, Operations Research, or other quantitative disciplines may also be considered when paired with relevant experience in automation, fulfillment systems, or operational performance engineering; Master’s degree a plus.
• 3+ years of experience in automation, industrial engineering or data science with a strong focus on system performance, throughput, cycle time, quality, and acceptance.
• Experience owning or supporting system acceptance, performance qualification, and release-readiness criteria for automated systems.
• Strong expertise in root-cause analysis and continuous improvement methods
• Strong analytical capability with SQL, Python, and BI/reporting tools (for example Power BI) to investigate operational performance, validate KPI logic, and turn complex data into actionable insights.
• Experience building or supporting dashboards, recurring scorecards, or insight tools used by operations, engineering, or leadership teams.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to translate technical findings into clear actions for executive, cross-functional, field, and vendor audiences.

Nice To Haves

• AI enthusiast with a passion for leveraging emerging technologies to drive innovation and enhance operational capabilities.
• Experience building telemetry pipelines, real-time dashboards, or alerting and observability tools.
• Experience in data science, data modeling or data engineering
• Simulation, digital-twin, or capacity-modeling experience.
• Retail or e-commerce fulfillment experience, including pick-rate, wait-time, perfect-order, or throughput improvement programs at scale.
• Experience building associate-facing performance or diagnostic tools that improve system adoption and execution.
• Experience working with store-, order-, or event-level data to investigate exceptions and performance loss patterns.
• Experience with AS/RS, shuttles, AMRs, sortation, pick systems, or goods-to-person solutions.
• Hands-on experience with engineering and operations tools such as SCADA, CMMS, telemetry/event-log analysis, automation diagnostics, and performance dashboards.
• Experience working with vendors and cross-functional teams to define expectations, review performance, and improve follow-through on issues.

Responsibilities

• Instrument and analyze performance: define, validate, and monitor KPIs such as OEE, pick rate, tote cycle time, queue latency, downtime, wait time, perfect order, nil pick, OTP, and system health; build trend and insight reporting that surfaces actionable opportunities.
• Support system acceptance: define acceptance testing plans, success criteria, and vendor-specific automation potential and acceptance goals across throughput, cycle time, quality, uptime, and operational readiness.
• Find and help eliminate performance loss: partner with site, vendor, and cross-functional teams to perform structured root-cause analysis using operational data, automation studies, telemetry, and field observations; support corrective actions and verify impact.
• Partner on vendor expectations: translate system specifications into measurable SLAs, scorecards, and release gates; help run performance reviews and track issue follow-through.
• Indentify System Performance efficiency initiatives: design experiments, evaluate bottlenecks, and help standardize best practices across automation sites.
• Build performance and insight tools: develop dashboards, diagnostics, telemetry views, event-log analyses, health scores, Pareto views, and self-service reporting tools to support operational decision-making.
• Improve KPI visibility and trust: partner with data and business teams to validate metric definitions, align source-of-truth queries, and improve consistency between dashboards, reports, and operational conversations.
• Track performance to goal: maintain target-versus-actual performance views, highlight gaps, and help teams drive closure plans with site, operations, product, and vendor partners.
• Support deep-dive investigations: analyze store, order, and event-level data to understand exceptions, throughput loss, wait-time drivers, and quality defects, and translate findings into practical actions.
• Translate insights for action: create executive-ready summaries, recurring scorecards, and clear narratives that turn complex automation and fulfillment data into decisions.
• Feed future system designs: convert field learnings into requirement updates, design recommendations, and design-for-performance specifications for next-generation automation.
• Partner cross-functionally: work closely with operations, product, data, engineering, central teams, and external vendors to align on priorities, test ideas, and improve performance.

Benefits

• At Walmart, we offer competitive pay as well as performance-based bonus awards and other great benefits for a happier mind, body, and wallet.
• Health benefits include medical, vision and dental coverage.
• Financial benefits include 401(k), stock purchase and company-paid life insurance.
• Paid time off benefits include PTO (including sick leave), parental leave, family care leave, bereavement, jury duty, and voting.
• Other benefits include short-term and long-term disability, company discounts, Military Leave Pay, adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, and more.
• You will also receive 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees