(USA) Principal, Data Engineer
About The Position
This Principal Engineer role is responsible for architecting scalable data systems that process billions of advertising and customer signals across various workloads including real-time, near-real-time, micro-batch, and batch. The focus is on ensuring low latency, high throughput, resilience, replayability, idempotency, and cost-efficient scaling. The role involves unifying advertising data across campaigns, identity, audiences, measurement, optimization, CRM, and the advertiser lifecycle. A key aspect is building reusable, configuration-driven, multi-tenant platforms with standardized schemas, contracts, governance, observability, privacy, and deployment patterns. Modernizing legacy pipelines for real-time optimization, reporting, activation, and ML is also a significant responsibility. Furthermore, the role entails leading agentic data enablement, covering discovery, pipeline automation, monitoring, diagnostics, cost optimization, onboarding, recommendations, and secure, explainable production guardrails. The Global AdTech and MarTech team builds the data and decisioning platforms that power 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 various advertising formats including Sponsored Products, Display, CTV, offsite, social, and in-store advertising, as well as reporting, targeting, activation, optimization, forecasting, recommendations, and advertiser analytics. The team operates platforms processing billions of events and ad requests, and tens of billions of bids daily, with a design philosophy centered on throughput, latency, correctness, resilience, privacy, scalability, and cost efficiency. They are also advancing 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.
- Ability to connect real-time architecture decisions to campaign delivery, ROAS, reach, frequency, inventory utilization, and advertiser outcomes.
- Proven Principal-level leadership shaping architecture, standards, strategic trade-offs, design reviews, and senior technical talent.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and 5 years' experience in software engineering or related field, OR 7 years’ experience in software engineering or related field, OR 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.
- 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.
- Knowledge in implementing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standards, assistive technologies, and integrating digital accessibility seamlessly.
- Knowledge of accessibility best practices and joining efforts 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 and surrogacy expense reimbursement
- PTO and/or PPTO that can be used for vacation, sick leave, holidays, or other purposes.
- Live Better U education benefit program (for full-time and part-time associates, covering tuition, books, and fees for programs from high school completion to bachelor's degrees, including English Language Learning and short-form certificates).
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
