Principal Data Engineer
About The Position
The Principal Engineer will be responsible for architecting scalable data systems that process billions of advertising and customer signals across real-time, near-real-time, micro-batch, and batch workloads. This role ensures low latency, high throughput, resilience, replayability, idempotency, and cost-efficient scaling. The engineer will unify advertising data across campaigns, identity, audiences, measurement, optimization, CRM, and advertiser lifecycle. A key aspect of this role is building reusable, configuration-driven, multi-tenant platforms with standardized schemas, contracts, governance, observability, privacy, and deployment patterns. Additionally, the role involves modernizing legacy pipelines for real-time optimization, reporting, activation, and ML, and leading agentic data enablement spanning discovery, pipeline automation, monitoring, diagnostics, cost optimization, onboarding, recommendations, and secure, explainable production guardrails. About the team: Global AdTech and MarTech builds the data and decisioning platforms powering advertising across Walmart U.S., Sam’s Club, and international markets. This team connects identity, intent, audiences, campaigns, inventory, bidding, relevance, creative, transactions, attribution, and measurement at massive scale in real time. They enable Sponsored Products, Display, CTV, offsite, social, and in-store advertising, plus reporting, targeting, activation, optimization, forecasting, recommendations, and advertiser analytics. The team operates platforms processing billions of events, ad requests, and tens of billions of bids daily, designing for throughput, latency, correctness, resilience, privacy, scalability, and cost efficiency. They advance AI and agentic advertising through trusted, governed, reusable data foundations and decisioning capabilities.
Requirements
- Deep expertise designing billion-scale, real-time and near-real-time distributed data systems using Spark, Flink, Kafka, streaming, orchestration, and compute/storage optimization.
- Strong experience with GCP or equivalent cloud platforms, including BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataflow, Pub-Sub, Airflow, and modern data infrastructure.
- Deep understanding of low-latency architectures at Scale, partitioning, backpressure, replay, consistency, fault tolerance, resilience, recovery, and cost efficiency.
- Proven Principal-level leadership shaping architecture, standards, strategic trade-offs, design reviews, and senior technical talent.
- Option 1: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and 5 years' experience in software engineering or related field.
- Option 2: 7 years’ experience in software engineering or related field.
- Option 3: Master's degree in Computer Science and 3 years' experience in software engineering or related field.
- 4 years' experience in data engineering, database engineering, business intelligence, or business analytics.
Nice To Haves
- Strong AdTech/MarTech expertise across retail media, bidding, targeting, identity, attribution, measurement, reporting, CTV, and privacy-safe collaboration is desirable.
- Ability to connect real-time architecture decisions to campaign delivery, ROAS, reach, frequency, inventory utilization, and advertiser outcomes.
- Data engineering, database engineering, business intelligence, or business analytics, ETL tools and working with large data sets in the cloud.
- Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field and 5 years' experience in software engineering or related field.
- 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
- Lead the architecture of real-time, large-scale advertising and customer data platforms processing billions of signals with predictable latency, resilience, replayability, and cost efficiency.
- Define when workloads use streaming, near-real-time, micro-batch, or batch patterns while modernizing legacy pipelines.
- Provide technical leadership across the full advertising lifecycle, including events, identity, audiences, campaigns, measurement, optimization, CRM, and marketing data.
- Build reusable, multi-tenant, configuration-driven platforms with standardized schemas, contracts, observability, privacy, and deployment.
- Establish governed agentic data capabilities for discovery, pipeline creation, monitoring, diagnosis, optimization, onboarding, and AI-ready products, with production guardrails for security, reliability, explainability, safety, and measurable outcomes across global advertising businesses.
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
- Live Better U (Walmart-paid education benefit program for full-time and part-time associates)
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
