(USA) Principal, Data Scientist

Walmart • Sunnyvale, CA

9d • $132,000 - $286,000

About The Position

The Principal Data Scientist will be part of Walmart Marketplace’s data science team, working with the Marketplace engineering organization, product managers, and business stakeholders to build machine-learning products. Walmart Marketplace provides third-party sellers with tools for operations including onboarding, catalogs, order fulfillment, global opportunities, and returns and refunds, with a focus on scalable systems and a strong marketplace experience for sellers and customers.

This role provides technical and strategic leadership across multiple data science sub-domains and products. It translates business needs into analytical solutions, guides teams from prototyping through deployment and maintenance, promotes data science and ML operations practices, measures business impact, and advises stakeholders on algorithm-based recommendations. The position also partners across regions and functions, drives innovation and reusable approaches, and represents Walmart in the external data science community.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s, master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related area, with 10–15 years of relevant experience.
• At least 10 years of experience as a data science technical lead.
• Ability to drive projects from conception to production in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, including the ability to influence and inspire cross-functional teams.
• Deep experience building data science solutions in areas such as fraud prevention, forecasting, shrink and waste reduction, inventory management, recommendations, assortment, and price optimization.
• Deep experience leading multiple data science initiatives end to end, from translating business needs into analytical asks through solution development, deployment, and maintenance.
• Strong machine-learning experience, including classification, regression, NLP, forecasting, unsupervised models, optimization, graph ML, causal inference, causal ML, statistical learning, experimentation, and generative AI.
• Ability to scale and deploy data science solutions.
• Strong experience with Python and/or R.
• Experience with GCP or Azure.
• Strong experience with Python, PySpark, Google Cloud Platform, Vertex AI, Kubeflow, and model deployment.
• Strong experience with Hadoop big-data platforms, including Hive, MapReduce, HQL, and Scala.
• Experience with GPU/CUDA for computational efficiency.
• Minimum qualifications additionally list one of the following: a bachelor’s degree in a specified quantitative or technical field and 5 years of analytics-related experience; a master’s degree in such a field and 3 years of analytics-related experience; or 7 years of experience in an analytics or related field.

Nice To Haves

• For generative AI, experience with embedding generation from training materials; storage and retrieval from vector databases; setup and provisioning of managed LLM gateways; development of retrieval-augmented-generation LLM agents; model selection; iterative prompt engineering and fine-tuning based on accuracy and user feedback; monitoring; and governance.
• Data science, machine learning, and optimization-model experience.
• Ph.D. in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Information Technology, Operations Research, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or Econometrics.
• Publications or active peer-review work in related journals or conferences.
• Successful completion of one or more assessments in Python, Spark, Scala, or R.
• Experience using open-source frameworks such as scikit-learn, TensorFlow, or Torch.
• Background creating inclusive digital experiences, including knowledge of WCAG 2.2 AA, assistive technologies, and digital accessibility best practices.

Responsibilities

• Consult with business stakeholders on algorithm-based recommendations and help turn them into business actions.
• Partner with the Senior Manager and Director of Data Science to increase data science adoption in the domain.
• Guide data scientists, senior data scientists, and staff data scientists across multiple sub-domains to support timely delivery of ML products.
• Improve domain efficiency through data science and machine-learning best practices, ML operations, resource utilization, reusability, and multi-tenancy.
• Lead multiple complex ML products and guide senior technical leads in leading their products effectively.
• Promote synergies across products through algorithmic innovation and sharing best practices.
• Identify complex business problems that can be addressed with advanced machine learning, including opportunities and gaps in the business domain.
• Evaluate proposed business cases for projects and initiatives.
• Translate business requirements into strategies, initiatives, and projects aligned with business objectives, and drive execution of deliverables.
• Set deliverables based on success criteria and define metrics to measure progress and solution effectiveness.
• Quantify business impact and ensure regular impact measurement of domain ML products.
• Identify and review model evaluation metrics based on analytical requirements.
• Ensure the team documents and maintains testing information.
• Solve complex problems important to Walmart’s business and produce actionable insights.
• Use a product mindset to build, scale, and deploy holistic data science products after prototyping.
• Use incremental solution approaches and adapt flexibly to practical challenges.
• Present recommendations to business partners and influence plans through insights.
• Collaborate with associates in other regions to deliver services to customers globally.
• Deliver high-quality, business-driven analytical solutions with a customer-centric mindset.
• Drive innovation across approaches, methods, practices, processes, outcomes, delivery, and end-to-end problem solving.
• Engage proactively with the external community to strengthen Walmart’s brand and learn about industry practices.
• Promote and support company policies, procedures, mission, values, and standards of ethics and integrity.

Benefits

• 401(k) match
• Stock purchase plan
• Performance-based incentive awards and bonuses
• Paid maternity and parental leave
• Paid time off, including sick leave
• Medical, vision, and dental coverage
• Company-paid life insurance
• Short-term and long-term disability
• Family care leave
• Bereavement leave
• Jury duty leave
• Voting leave
• Company discounts
• Military Leave Pay
• Adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement
• Live Better U education benefit, including tuition, books, and fees for eligible programs

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal