Staff Data engineer
About The Position
Staff Data Engineer designs and builds high-scale platforms processing billions of advertising and customer signals across streaming, near-real-time, micro-batch, and batch workloads. Owns complex data domains from problem definition and design through production delivery and optimization. Engineers reliable systems with predictable latency, throughput, replayability, idempotency, fault recovery, and cost efficiency. Develops reusable, tenant-aware frameworks with standardized schemas, contracts, validation, observability, privacy, and deployment patterns. Modernizes pipelines supporting reporting, audience activation, measurement, optimization, and ML. Enables governed agentic workflows for discovery, development, monitoring, troubleshooting, documentation, and operational automation while improving engineering standards and delivery velocity across teams. About the team: Global AdTech and MarTech builds data and decisioning platforms powering advertising across Walmart U.S., Sam’s Club, and international markets. Connects identity, intent, audiences, campaigns, inventory, bidding, relevance, creative, transactions, attribution, and measurement at massive scale. Enables Sponsored Products, Display, Connected TV, offsite, social, and in-store advertising, along with reporting, targeting, optimization, forecasting, recommendations, and analytics. Operates platforms processing billions of events and tens of billions of bids daily. Designs for latency, correctness, resilience, privacy, scalability, tenant isolation, and cost efficiency. Advances AI and agentic advertising through trusted, governed, reusable data foundations for advertisers, customers, and internal business teams.
Requirements
- Strong experience designing and operating billion-scale distributed data systems using Spark, Kafka, streaming, orchestration, and large-scale batch technologies.
- Deep expertise in SQL, data modeling, partitioning, performance tuning, incremental processing, and compute and storage optimization.
- Hands-on experience with GCP or equivalent cloud platforms, including BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, GCS, and Airflow.
- Strong Python skills plus Java or Scala proficiency.
- Knowledge of data quality, lineage, observability, CI/CD, testing, reliability, and incident management.
- Proven Staff-level leadership through domain ownership, cross-team influence, design reviews, mentoring, and measurable platform improvements at scale across complex production environments globally.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and 4 years' experience in software engineering or related field.
- 6 years’ experience in software engineering or related field.
- Master's degree in Computer Science and 2 years' experience in software engineering or related field.
- 3 years' experience in data engineering, database engineering, business intelligence, or business analytics.
Nice To Haves
- AdTech or MarTech experience is preferred.
- 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 4 years' experience in software engineering or related field.
- 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
- Own major capabilities across advertising events, campaigns, identity, audiences, measurement, reporting, bidding, recommendations, forecasting, CRM, and marketing data.
- Build high-throughput streaming and near-real-time pipelines with replay, idempotency, fault recovery, and correct handling of late or duplicate events.
- Define latency, freshness, completeness, quality, and reliability objectives.
- Create reusable, tenant-aware frameworks supporting multiple businesses and markets.
- Optimize Spark, Kafka, BigQuery, Dataproc, storage, and orchestration performance and cost.
- Strengthen data quality, lineage, observability, testing, deployment, and incident response.
- Lead domain design reviews, mentor engineers, and enable governed agentic workflows for discovery, automation, diagnostics, and onboarding across global advertising products and partner teams.
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
- Jury duty
- Voting
- Short-term disability
- Long-term disability
- Company discounts
- Military Leave Pay
- Adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement
- 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.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
