PRINCIPAL, DATA SCIENTIST
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 8, 2026. First seen by Alion on Nov 4, 2026. Walmart scores A on the Alion truth index.
Position Summary...
What you'll do...
About the Team
The Foundation Models team builds shared, reusable AI that the rest of Walmart builds on. Our models serve Walmart US, International markets, and Sam's Club in many areas: online search and recommendations, sponsored products, catalog understanding, store and inventory planning and optimization, and Walmart's conversational agents for customers, sellers, engineers, and associates. We train models at scale, and they lift many products at the same time.
What you'll do:
This is a senior IC role with real room to set direction. You will define the problem statements and the solution direction. You'll own the full lifecycle: spotting the highest-leverage bets, getting stakeholders on board, framing the science, and leading execution through data engineering, large-scale training, inference optimization, and production rollout. We'll judge success by what ships and what customers and the business can measure, not by prototypes.
Identify problems: Find where foundation models can bring step-change gains across Walmart, then write the science vision and multi-quarter roadmap.
- Influence: Build alignment across product, engineering, ads, merchandising, and supply chain teams in the US and India. Change long-held assumptions using evidence.
- Formulate the science: Turn ambiguous business goals into precise objectives, model architectures, loss functions, and evaluation frameworks, both offline and online.
- Execute end to end: Lead data engineering over billions of interactions, large-scale distributed GPU training, and inference optimization (distillation, quantization, caching, custom kernels).
- Drive adoption: Take models through A/B tests into production, measure the business impact, and turn wins into platforms that many teams reuse.
- Raise the bar: Mentor scientists and engineers, lead design and research reviews, and represent Walmart through publications, patents, and open-source work.
What you'll bring:
Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related field.
- 10+ years of experience applying cutting-edge deep learning, with deep expertise in at least two of: Recommender Systems, Language Models, Multimodal Models, Deep Reinforcement Learning.
- Experience building large-scale GPU training and/or inference systems:
- Hands-on experience with distributed GPU training, including data, tensor, and pipeline parallelism, FSDP/DeepSpeed/Megatron-style frameworks, and mixed precision.
- Experience with low-latency inference serving (e.g. vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, Triton Inference Server) and model compression.
- Able to profile and debug performance across the stack, and to optimize kernels in CUDA and/or Triton.
- A track record of taking deep learning models from idea to production at scale, with measurable business impact.
- Expert in Python and PyTorch (or JAX), and comfortable with large-scale data processing (Spark, BigQuery, or similar).
- Proven ability to lead through influence: setting technical direction and driving adoption across teams without direct authority.
About Walmart Global Tech
Imagine working in an environment where one line of code can make life easier for hundreds of millions of people. That’s what we do at Walmart Global Tech. We’re a team of software engineers, data scientists, cybersecurity expert's and service professionals within the world’s leading retailer who make an epic impact and are at the forefront of the next retail disruption. People are why we innovate, and people power our innovations. We are people-led and tech-empowered.
We train our team in the skillsets of the future and bring in experts like you to help us grow. We have roles for those chasing their first opportunity as well as those looking for the opportunity that will define their career. Here, you can kickstart a great career in tech, gain new skills and experience for virtually every industry, or leverage your expertise to innovate at scale, impact millions and reimagine the future of retail.
Flexible, hybrid work
Walmart’s culture sets us apart, and we know being together helps us innovate, learn and grow great careers. This role is based in our [Bangalore/Chennai] office for daily work, with the flexibility for associates to manage their personal lives.
Benefits
Beyond our great compensation package, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include a host of best-in-class benefits maternity and parental leave, PTO, health benefits, and much more.
Belonging
We aim to create a culture where every associate feels valued for who they are, rooted in respect for the individual. Our goal is to foster a sense of belonging, to create opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers, and to be a Walmart for everyone.
At Walmart, our vision is "everyone included." By fostering a workplace culture where everyone is-and feels-included, everyone wins. Our associates and customers reflect the makeup of all 19 countries where we operate. By making Walmart a welcoming place where all people feel like they belong, we’re able to engage associates, strengthen our business, improve our ability to serve customers, and support the communities where we operate.
Equal Opportunity Employer
Walmart, Inc., is an Equal Opportunities Employer - By Choice. We believe we are best equipped to help our associates, customers and the communities we serve live better when we really know them. That means understanding, respecting and valuing unique styles, experiences, identities, ideas and opinions - while being inclusive of all people.
Minimum Qualifications...
Outlined below are the required minimum qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no minimum qualifications.
Minimum Qualifications:Option 1: Bachelors degree in Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Technology or related field and 5 years' experience in an analytics related field. Option 2: Masters degree in Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Technology or related field and 3 years' experience in an analytics related field. Option 3: 7 years' experience in an analytics or related field.Preferred Qualifications...
Outlined below are the optional preferred qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no preferred qualifications.