Walmart

Distinguished Software Engineer – AI/ML

Walmart

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Office

Location: SunnyvaleCaliforniaUnited States

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Salary

💰 $169,000 - $338,000 per year

Job Level

About the role

  • Shape the long-term AI engineering roadmap for Walmart Ads, aligning with the org vision of becoming the definitive AI-native omnichannel RMN.
  • Lead the strategy for pre-training, fine-tuning, and aligning (RLHF/DPO) open-weight foundation models explicitly for the retail media domain.
  • Architect highly scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines that ground LLM outputs in real-time inventory, pricing, and hyper-local store data.
  • Architect and deploy autonomous AI agents capable of complex reasoning, tool-use, and multi-step planning.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with Ads Product, Data Science, and Engineering to integrate LLMs & agentic AI into core ad surfaces (Search, Display, Video, In-Store) and omnichannel measurement.
  • Drive inference optimization (quantization, vLLM, TensorRT) to ensure generative models are cost-efficient and meet the strict ultra-low latency requirements (sub-100ms) of programmatic ad exchanges and real-time bidding (RTB) environments.
  • Ensure all AI capabilities are cleanly decoupled yet tightly integrated with core ad servers, SSPs, DSPs, and yield management engines handling millions of queries per second (QPS).

Requirements

  • PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or related field.
  • 12+ years of ML engineering experience, with at least 5+ years operating at a Principal, Staff, or Distinguished level in a high-scale tech environment.
  • Deep hands-on expertise in training, fine-tuning, and deploying Large Language Models and Foundation Models into production.
  • Proven track record of designing complex systems using LLM orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex), reasoning frameworks (Chain-of-Thought, ReAct), and multi-agent architectures.
  • Strong background in designing highly available, low-latency distributed systems (handling 100K+ QPS) using cloud-native architectures (GCP, Azure, or AWS).
  • Expert-level proficiency in Python, Go, Rust, or C++, alongside modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow).
  • Experience with scalable vector databases (Milvus, Pinecone), feature stores, and real-time streaming pipelines (Kafka, Flink).
  • Strong foundational knowledge of programmatic advertising, Real-Time Bidding (RTB), click-through rate (CTR) prediction, and dynamic creative optimization.
  • Patents or publications in top-tier AI conferences (NeurIPS, ICML) are a strong plus.
Benefits
  • Health benefits include medical, vision and dental coverage.
  • Financial benefits include 401(k), stock purchase and company-paid life insurance.
  • Paid time off benefits include PTO (including sick leave), parental leave, family care leave, bereavement, jury duty, and voting.
  • Other benefits include short-term and long-term disability, company discounts, Military Leave Pay, adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, and more.
  • Live Better U is a Walmart-paid education benefit program for full-time and part-time associates in Walmart and Sam's Club facilities.
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
Machine LearningLarge Language ModelsFoundation ModelsPythonGoRustC++PyTorchJAXTensorFlow
Soft Skills
leadershipcollaborationstrategic thinkingcomplex problem solving
Certifications
PhDMaster’s degree