Principal, Software Engineer
Position Summary...
As a Principal Engineer on the GTP Service Mesh team, you will define and drive the architecture, standards, and long-term technical strategy for a scalable, secure, and highly reliable service mesh platform. You’ll partner across platform, application, SRE, networking, and security teams to enable consistent service-to-service connectivity, traffic management, and zero-trust controls across Kubernetes environments. This role is highly hands-on and requires deep expertise in container orchestration and service mesh technologies (Istio or similar), including modern patterns such as Ambient Mesh and multi-cluster deployments, to accelerate adoption and improve developer experience at scale.You will guide the evolution of Walmart’s service connectivity strategy-covering service registration/discovery, routing, load balancing, mTLS, policy enforcement, and progressive delivery-while ensuring high performance and operational simplicity at massive scale. You will mentor engineers, influence product roadmaps, and lead execution of complex initiatives that improve developer experience and platform reliability for systems used by millions of customers and associates.
What you'll do...
About the team
Run Time Platforms (RTP), a division of Global Technology Platform (GTP), builds the core products and platforms that enable application teams to deploy, operate, and scale services consistently across Walmart’s runtime environments. RTP’s mission is to reduce operational complexity and accelerate delivery by providing secure-by-default, reliable, and standardized runtime capabilities-so teams can focus on building customer and associate experiences rather than reinventing infrastructure.
Within RTP, the Service Registry & Service Mesh team provides the foundational connectivity layer for modern distributed systems. We build and operate platforms that make it easy for services to find each other, communicate securely, and be governed consistently across clusters, environments, and markets. Our work underpins service-to-service communication for a large fleet of microservices and supports high-throughput, latency-sensitive workloads.
What You’ll Do
Lead the technical strategy and architecture for the service mesh platform (e.g., Istio or equivalent) across multi-cluster, multi-environment deployments.
- Drive design and implementation of traffic management, resiliency patterns, and secure service-to-service communication (mTLS, authZ/authN, policy).
- Build and evolve platform capabilities for onboarding services at scale (templates, golden paths, automation, self-service workflows).
- Partner with application, SRE, security, and network teams to define standards for service connectivity, identity, and zero-trust posture.
- Own performance, reliability, and scalability goals for the mesh control/data plane; define SLOs/SLIs and operational runbooks.
- Establish observability standards (metrics, logs, traces) and enable end-to-end visibility across services and clusters.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership for incident response, root cause analysis, and long-term remediation.
- Evaluate and introduce new mesh capabilities (ambient/service-less patterns, gateways, WASM/extensibility, multi-tenancy) with clear ROI.
- Mentor senior engineers, raise engineering rigor (design reviews, technical docs, testing strategy), and influence org-wide adoption.
- Represent the team in architecture forums; communicate trade-offs and align stakeholders on platform roadmaps.
What You’ll bring
- 15-20 years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems and platforms.
- Deep expertise in Kubernetes/container orchestration (cluster architecture, networking, upgrades, multi-cluster, RBAC, admission, controllers/operators).
- Strong hands-on experience with service mesh technologies (Istio preferred; Linkerd/Consul/App Mesh acceptable), including:
- Traffic management (routing, retries/timeouts, circuit breaking)
- Security (mTLS, cert management, identity, policy)
- Gateways/ingress/egress patterns and service discovery
- Control plane operations and upgrade strategies
- Strong understanding of cloud-native networking (CNI, Envoy/L7 proxies, DNS, east-west traffic, gateways, load balancing).
- Proven track record of designing for reliability and scale: SRE principles, SLOs, capacity planning, and failure-mode analysis.
- Experience building platform tooling and automation (GitOps, CI/CD, Helm/Kustomize, Terraform or similar IaC).
- Proficiency in at least one systems language (Go preferred; Java/Scala/Python acceptable) and experience building operators/controllers is a plus.
- Deep observability experience (Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing) and ability to translate telemetry into action.
- Strong security mindset (zero trust, least privilege, secret management) and experience partnering with security/compliance teams.
- Excellent communication skills-able to drive alignment across engineering orgs and influence without 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.
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.
Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 5 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.Option 2: 7 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.
Preferred Qualifications...
Outlined below are the optional preferred qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no preferred qualifications.
Master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 3 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.