(USA) Senior Director, Product Management

Walmart•Bentonville, AR

3d•$160,000 - $416,000•Onsite

About The Position

The Senior Director of Product Management for Walmart’s Enterprise AI Platform defines the product vision, strategy, and execution for a foundational platform supporting Walmart’s AI transformation. The platform provides shared capabilities for AI workloads, including MLOps, model and inference access, LLM gateway services, developer experience, model lifecycle management, observability, governance, reliability, and AI economics. It is intended to help teams build and operate AI solutions quickly, safely, reliably, and economically at enterprise scale. The role requires strategic product leadership, technical depth, understanding of the evolving AI ecosystem, executive influence, financial discipline, and a bias for action. The Senior Director partners with engineering leaders, architects, AI and infrastructure teams, governance and security partners, and business leaders to make decisions about models, infrastructure, developer experience, safety, economics, and platform architecture. The leader will establish durable platform capabilities, guide the platform through changes in AI technology, and connect product investments to customer needs and measurable enterprise outcomes. The position includes building and developing a high-performing product organization, aligning stakeholders across organizational boundaries, and establishing a platform that teams choose because it improves their speed and effectiveness. Success includes accelerating teams’ transition from experimentation to production, enabling flexibility across models and providers, and making cost, safety, reliability, governance, and developer experience core platform capabilities. The role is listed with primary locations in Bentonville, Arkansas, and Sunnyvale, California. The annual salary range is $160,000–$320,000 in Bentonville and $208,000–$416,000 in Sunnyvale. Additional compensation includes annual or quarterly performance bonuses, and certain positions may include stock.

Requirements

Extensive product leadership experience building and scaling AI/ML platforms, developer platforms, cloud platforms, infrastructure products, or other highly technical enterprise platforms.
Demonstrated success defining platform strategy and translating it into roadmaps, technical capabilities, operating mechanisms, adoption, and measurable outcomes.
Strong understanding of the modern AI ecosystem, including machine learning, generative AI, foundation models, multimodal systems, AI agents, inference, MLOps, model lifecycle management, evaluation, observability, and AI infrastructure.
Sufficient technical depth to engage credibly with senior engineers, architects, distinguished technical leaders, infrastructure teams, and AI experts on complex architectural and product decisions.
Strong product judgment and ability to distinguish individual feature requests from reusable platform capabilities that create enterprise leverage.
Demonstrated ability to understand APIs, platform abstractions, developer workflows, distributed systems, reliability, performance, and cloud infrastructure.
Strong understanding of AI economics, including model pricing, token consumption, inference costs, infrastructure utilization, capacity, and cost-performance tradeoffs.
Ability to operate in rapidly evolving and ambiguous environments, establish first principles, create structure from incomplete information, and drive decisions and execution.
Strong strategic and systems thinking, connecting customer needs, technology evolution, architecture, economics, risk, and enterprise strategy.
Exceptional storytelling and executive communication skills, including the ability to simplify sophisticated technical concepts while preserving substance for sound decisions.
Strong listening skills, maturity, self-awareness, and intellectual flexibility; ability to form clear points of view, challenge assumptions, and change direction when evidence warrants it.
Demonstrated ability to influence senior leaders and highly technical teams across organizational boundaries through credibility, clarity, and results.
Strong bias for action and practical problem solving, balanced with judgment about when foundational decisions require deeper consideration.
Strong business and financial acumen, connecting platform investments and technology decisions to cost, efficiency, adoption, risk, and business value.
Experience building and developing strong product teams and senior product leaders.
Entrepreneurial mindset combined with enterprise leadership maturity, including the ability to move with urgency, challenge assumptions, create possibilities, and build capabilities that operate reliably at global scale.
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related area and 13 years of product management experience; alternatively, 15 years of experience in product management or a related area.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading product strategy for AI/ML platforms, MLOps platforms, inference or model gateways, GenAI platforms, developer platforms, or large-scale cloud infrastructure.
Experience across commercial and open model ecosystems and understanding of the technical and economic implications of model optionality.
Experience with model gateways, routing, quotas, capacity management, inference optimization, evaluation, prompt or model lifecycle management, agents, and runtime observability.
Experience building platforms that support traditional ML as well as generative or agentic AI workloads.
Experience with AI governance, Responsible AI, security, privacy, or safety engineering.
Experience owning products with significant infrastructure or third-party consumption costs and driving improvements in unit economics.
Experience making build-versus-buy decisions and working with cloud providers, model providers, open-source technologies, and emerging AI companies.
Experience leading global product teams and influencing highly distributed engineering and business organizations.
Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business Administration, or a related area and 12 years of experience as a product manager, ideally on consumer-facing, large-scale, highly complex B2B/C products.
Supervisory experience.
Knowledge of inclusive digital experiences, WCAG 2.2 AA standards, assistive technologies, and digital accessibility best practices.

Responsibilities

Define the long-term product vision and strategy for Walmart’s Enterprise AI Platform and translate Walmart’s AI ambitions into priorities, platform capabilities, and investment decisions.
Anticipate developments in foundation models, multimodal AI, agents, inference technologies, orchestration, and AI infrastructure, and evolve the platform ahead of enterprise demand.
Define durable shared platform abstractions across models, providers, infrastructure, lifecycle management, governance, and developer workflows.
Enable teams to select models and infrastructure based on capability, quality, performance, cost, availability, and risk while minimizing unnecessary lock-in.
Improve the developer experience for discovering, onboarding to, experimenting with, evaluating, deploying, observing, and operating AI workloads from development through production.
Develop platform capabilities and mechanisms that help teams understand and optimize model consumption, infrastructure utilization, unit economics, capacity, and cost-performance tradeoffs.
Partner with AI Governance, Security, Privacy, Legal, Compliance, and Risk teams to make enterprise controls, observability, and guardrails scalable and easy to adopt.
Establish platform defaults and paved roads that make safe, reliable, secure, governed, and cost-efficient practices easy to follow.
Evaluate commercial and open models, infrastructure providers, emerging AI technologies, and open-source ecosystems; determine where Walmart should build, buy, partner, integrate, or standardize.
Assess emerging AI technologies, distinguish durable trends from hype, and determine which developments materially affect platform strategy.
Build relationships with engineering, product, data science, and business teams; use feedback, telemetry, adoption data, and direct engagement to identify friction and shape the roadmap.
Drive platform adoption by demonstrating product value and systematically removing adoption barriers.
Partner with engineering leadership on architecture, APIs, inference, MLOps, orchestration, reliability, observability, capacity, and developer workflows.
Frame complex problems, establish principles, evaluate tradeoffs, make decisions with incomplete information, and move teams from ambiguity to execution.
Communicate a compelling platform story to engineers, product teams, executives, and business leaders, connecting technical investments to enterprise strategy and measurable outcomes.
Prioritize foundational investments, customer needs, technology evolution, reliability, technical debt, safety, cost, and strategic bets while focusing on areas of highest enterprise leverage.
Establish and track outcomes including adoption, onboarding, developer productivity, reliability, performance, utilization, cost efficiency, governance coverage, customer satisfaction, and business impact.
Align Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, Governance, Security, Data, Finance, Procurement, and business teams around shared priorities and decisions.
Recruit and develop product leaders and foster a culture of customer focus, technical curiosity, ownership, intellectual honesty, urgency, and high standards.

Benefits

Competitive pay and performance-based bonus awards.
Medical, vision, and dental coverage.
401(k).
Stock purchase plan.
Company-paid life insurance.
Paid time off, including sick leave.
Parental leave and family care leave.
Bereavement leave, jury duty leave, and voting leave.
Short-term and long-term disability.
Company discounts.
Military Leave Pay.
Adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement.
PTO and/or PPTO that may be used for vacation, sick leave, holidays, or other purposes.
Live Better U Walmart-paid education benefit, including eligible tuition, books, and fees for programs ranging from high school completion to bachelor’s degrees, English Language Learning, and short-form certificates.