Staff, Software Engineer

Walmart•Sunnyvale, CA

7h•Onsite

About The Position

Building the right technology foundation for Infrastructure & platforms is vital to success at the scale of Walmart. Our team builds and maintains the foundational technologies that support the tech organization. Included in this are data platforms, enterprise architecture, DevOps, cloud computing, and infrastructure. All of these products and services are supported by scalable and powerful infrastructure, ensuring a secure and seamless employee and customer experience across stores, digital channels, and distribution centers. The Change Engineering organization designs and builds intelligent capabilities that enable safe, reliable, and efficient technology change across the enterprise. Our mission is to enable faster delivery of business value while reducing operational risk to critical systems. We achieve this through automation, AI-driven risk intelligence, and deep integration with cloud, observability, topology, and ITSM platforms. We are looking for a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership in designing, building, and scaling intelligent systems that power our enterprise Change Engineering solution. This is a highly technical role requiring strong expertise in software engineering, distributed systems, cloud platforms, AI/ML, and enterprise integrations, with a focus on building production-grade solutions at scale. The ideal candidate will operate at the intersection of AI/ML, platform engineering, and IT operations, translating complex operational challenges into scalable software and intelligent automation. You will design and build intelligent workflows, decision-support systems, and automation that improve the safety, reliability, and efficiency of technology changes across the enterprise. As a Staff Engineer, you will be expected to set technical direction, influence cross functional teams, perform design reviews, mentor engineers, and hands-on delivery. You will help evolve Change Engineering from individual automation and workflows into a scalable, intelligent platform. You will also contribute to the end-to-end AI lifecycle—from data ingestion and model integration to evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement—ensuring AI-powered capabilities are accurate, explainable, reliable, secure, and production-ready.

Requirements

Core Software Engineering: Strong software engineering fundamentals and extensive experience building production-grade distributed systems.
Strong programming experience in Python, Java, JavaScript, PowerShell, or equivalent languages.
Experience designing REST APIs, event-driven systems, webhooks, and asynchronous workflows.
Strong understanding of CI/CD, automated testing, and operational readiness.
Hands-on experience with Azure, GCP, or comparable cloud platforms.
Experience with SQL/NoSQL databases, data pipelines, caching, messaging/event platforms, and distributed data processing.
Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, logging, tracing, and production operations.
Enterprise Platforms & Integration: Experience with ServiceNow Change Management or comparable ITSM platforms.
Strong focus on data quality, consistency, lineage, security, and governance.
AI / ML / GenAI: Experience integrating AI/ML models and/or LLM APIs into production applications.
Strong understanding of LLM application architecture, including model integration, context management, grounding/retrieval, evaluation, and guardrails.
Experience with risk scoring, anomaly detection, classification, recommendation systems, or other decision-support applications.
Understanding of model evaluation, monitoring, explainability, and continuous improvement.
Experience designing reliable and scalable AI-powered production systems, including considerations for latency, cost, accuracy, and failure handling.
Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 4 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.
Option 2: 6 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computer Information Systems, Software Engineering, or related area and 2 years' experience in software engineering or related area.
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

Technical Leadership: Lead architecture and detailed design for complex, distributed, and highly integrated systems. Establish engineering standards, reusable patterns, and best practices across software, APIs, automation, and AI/ML capabilities. Lead technical design reviews and influence engineering decisions across teams and organizations. Identify opportunities to simplify, modernize, and standardize the technology landscape. Mentor engineers and help raise the technical capabilities of the broader engineering organization.
Build intelligent workflows for change request creation, risk assessment, approval routing, scheduling, validation, and verification.
Develop services and automation that improve change success, failure, and health metrics through instrumentation and data-driven engineering.
Apply strong software engineering practices including modular architecture, automated testing, observability, security, and operational readiness.
Enterprise Integration & Automation: Design event-driven and API-based architectures that enable reliable, scalable system-to-system integration. Build automation for pre-change validation, dependency and impact analysis, risk assessment, and post-change verification. Design solutions that maintain data consistency, integrity, lineage, and traceability across enterprise systems. Enable ingestion and retrieval of topology, configuration, policy, incident, and operational data to support intelligent decision-making. Develop reusable integration patterns and platform capabilities that can be leveraged across multiple teams and use cases.
AI/ML & Intelligent Automation: Architect and integrate AI/ML and LLM-based capabilities into enterprise engineering workflows. Apply techniques such as anomaly detection, classification, recommendation systems, risk scoring, and LLM-based reasoning to solve complex operational problems. Design intelligent systems that combine enterprise data, operational context, and AI to provide actionable insights and decision support. Implement appropriate retrieval, grounding, context management, and evaluation strategies for LLM-powered applications. Build mechanisms to evaluate AI outputs against real-world outcomes and continuously improve accuracy, reliability, and trust. Establish appropriate guardrails, observability, evaluation, and fallback mechanisms for production AI systems. Partner with engineering, product, architecture, and operations stakeholders to move AI capabilities from experimentation to enterprise-scale production.
Reliability, Performance & Operational Excellence: Design systems for high availability, fault tolerance, scalability, and graceful degradation. Establish appropriate SLOs, SLIs, observability, alerting, and operational practices for critical services. Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across applications, APIs, data stores, and distributed systems. Drive proactive improvements based on production telemetry, incidents, and operational trends. Ensure systems have appropriate failure handling, resiliency, recovery, and rollback strategies.

Benefits

Incentive awards for performance
401(k) match
Stock purchase plan
Paid maternity and parental leave
PTO
Multiple health plans
Competitive pay
Performance-based bonus awards
Medical coverage
Vision coverage
Dental coverage
Company-paid life insurance
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 is a Walmart-paid education benefit program for full-time and part-time associates in Walmart and Sam's Club facilities. Programs range from high school completion to bachelor's degrees, including English Language Learning and short-form certificates. Tuition, books, and fees are completely paid for by Walmart.