Distinguished Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States; home office at 815 Eleventh Ave

Annual salary: $169,000–$338,000, plus performance-based bonuses and potential stock compensation.

Company

hirify.global is part of Walmart, a large retail organization building global digital commerce, search, personalization, and AI platforms.

What you will do

• Define the multi-year technical strategy and reference architecture for international search and personalization.
• Architect AI-native discovery capabilities, including LLM-powered query understanding, semantic and hybrid retrieval, generative shopping, agentic experiences, and real-time personalization.
• Design multi-tenant, multi-market platforms supporting new markets, languages, catalogs, and customer behaviors from shared foundations.
• Establish standards for system design, MLOps, data quality, model evaluation, responsible AI, observability, and resilience.
• Resolve complex architecture, performance, cost, incident, and modernization challenges across platforms.
• Mentor Principal and Senior engineers and partner with engineering, product, data science, business, and executive stakeholders.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience designing and developing highly scalable distributed applications and platforms.
• Distinguished experience architecting and operating cloud-native systems for search, recommendations, personalization, or ad serving at large scale.
• Deep expertise in search and retrieval, vector search, ranking, recommendations, personalization, generative AI, ML platforms, MLOps, and data engineering.
• Experience with technologies such as Vespa, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, FAISS, Milvus, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Spark, Kafka, Flink, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, Scala, Go, or C++ and experience with experimentation, observability, resilience, and low-latency inference.
• Bachelor’s degree with six years of relevant experience, or eight years of relevant experience; the role is based in the Sunnyvale, United States home office.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, or a related area.
• Experience building inclusive digital experiences and implementing WCAG 2.2 AA standards and assistive technologies.
• Experience with multilingual search, localization, and market-specific catalog and assortment handling.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, vision, and dental coverage.
• 401(k), stock purchase opportunities, company-paid life insurance, and performance-based bonuses.
• Paid time off, sick leave, parental leave, family care leave, bereavement leave, jury duty, and voting leave.
• Short- and long-term disability coverage, company discounts, military leave pay, and adoption and surrogacy reimbursement.
• Walmart-paid education benefits covering eligible tuition, books, and fees.