Senior Director, Data Science

Walmart • Sunnyvale, CA

90d • $208,000 - $416,000

About The Position

Walmart is seeking a Sr. Director of Data Science - Fraud & Risk to lead data science efforts that protect our end-to-end retail and marketplace ecosystem. In this high-impact leadership role, you will oversee teams building models to detect, prevent, and mitigate fraud and risk across buyer, seller, store, and delivery partner flows—supporting billions of transactions across both digital and physical channels. You'll drive strategy, experimentation, and large-scale deployment of ML solutions that ensure a secure and seamless customer experience while minimizing financial and reputational exposure. This role is ideal for a strategic leader with deep technical roots, strong people leadership, and a proven ability to convert ML innovation into measurable business outcomes.

Requirements

• 10+ years in data science or applied ML, with 5+ years leading teams working on risk, fraud, or trust & safety in high-scale environments (e.g., marketplaces, fintech, e-commerce).
• Proven hands-on experience with ML techniques including supervised learning, anomaly detection, graph neural networks, embeddings, and real-time decisioning systems.
• Track record of deploying production-grade models using modern ML infrastructure (e.g., feature stores, real-time scoring, batch pipelines, monitoring/alerting frameworks).
• Demonstrated ability to drive research-to-production innovation—owning both technical strategy and business impact.
• Strong leadership and mentorship experience, with a history of growing high-performing data science teams and shaping inclusive, collaborative cultures.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to present scientific findings and product impact clearly to executives and cross-functional partners.

Nice To Haves

• Publications, open-source contributions, or patents in ML, fraud detection, or related fields.

Responsibilities

• Lead and scale a high-performing data science team focused on fraud and risk model development across e-commerce, in-store, marketplace, and last-mile logistics domains.
• Own the full lifecycle of fraud detection models: problem framing, data ingestion, feature engineering, model training, evaluation, deployment, and continuous monitoring.
• Establish a scalable infrastructure for real-time and batch scoring, including champion/challenger testing, feature drift detection, and shadow deployment pipelines.
• Advance cutting-edge ML research in areas such as graph-based identity resolution, semi-supervised learning, foundation models for behavioral risk, and adversarial detection.
• Establish rigorous model governance: performance monitoring dashboards, data quality checks, bias mitigation, and compliance audits.
• Foster an innovation-driven culture—encouraging rapid prototyping, peer-reviewed experimentation, and contributions to open source and academic publications.
• Translate ML outputs into actionable risk decisions and operational interventions that drive measurable improvement in fraud loss, false positive rate, payment declines, and customer trust.
• Collaborate closely with stakeholders in Product, Engineering, Risk Operations, Legal, and Compliance to embed intelligence into checkout, returns, seller onboarding, driver flows, and more.
• Contribute to executive planning by communicating results, risks, and opportunities with clarity and strategic framing.
• Champion best practices in scientific rigor, model governance, responsible AI, and high-velocity delivery.

Benefits

• Competitive pay as well as performance-based bonus awards.
• Health benefits including medical, vision and dental coverage.
• Financial benefits including 401(k), stock purchase and company-paid life insurance.
• Paid time off benefits including PTO (including sick leave), parental leave, family care leave, bereavement, jury duty, and voting.
• Short-term and long-term disability.
• Company discounts.
• Military Leave Pay.
• Adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement.
• Live Better U education benefit program for full-time and part-time associates.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Industry: General Merchandise Retailers
• Education Level: Master's degree