Principal Software Engineer (Data Engineering)

Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States; hybrid work with primary in-office presence

Salary: $143,000–$286,000 annually, plus performance bonuses and possible stock compensation.

Company

Walmart Global Tech develops software, data, and machine learning systems supporting Walmart's global retail and e-commerce operations.

What you will do

• Lead the architecture and delivery of scalable, cloud-native data pipelines and reusable data infrastructure.
• Own ingestion, transformation, orchestration, testing, deployment, monitoring, and reliability for distributed data systems.
• Build batch and streaming pipelines that produce ML-ready features and datasets for search and personalization.
• Define data modeling, pipeline design, observability, validation, lineage, and SLA practices.
• Partner with machine learning, search, product, and engineering stakeholders to translate requirements into measurable data solutions.
• Mentor engineers, influence architecture decisions, and drive adoption of modern data engineering technologies.

Requirements

• Extensive experience leading large-scale data engineering initiatives involving distributed processing, data modeling, and cloud-native platforms.
• Expertise with Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Airflow, or comparable big data and orchestration technologies.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, or Scala, with production ETL/ELT and streaming experience.
• Understanding of data warehousing, feature engineering, and infrastructure supporting ML/AI systems.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP and CI/CD practices for data systems.
• Bachelor's degree plus 5 years of relevant experience, or 7 years of relevant experience; immigration sponsorship is not available.

Nice to have

• Master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, or a related field.
• Knowledge of WCAG 2.2 AA, assistive technologies, and digital accessibility practices.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work combining campus collaboration with virtual work according to business needs.
• Medical, vision, dental, life insurance, disability coverage, and 401(k) benefits.
• Paid time off, sick leave, parental leave, family care leave, and other leave programs.
• Performance-based incentive awards, employee discounts, stock purchase options, and potential stock compensation.
• Walmart-paid education support covering eligible tuition, books, and fees.