Senior Data Scientist (AI)

Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States; Home Office at 815 Eleventh Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-4731.

Annual salary: $117,000.00–$234,000.00, plus performance bonuses and potential stock compensation.

Company

hirify.global is part of Walmart’s Retail Intelligence and AI & Data organization, developing AI and machine learning platforms, models, and services for shopping, social commerce, advertising, creator experiences, marketing, and rich-media content.

What you will do

• Build, evaluate, and improve machine learning and Generative AI models for LLMs, image and video generation, multimodal understanding, and agentic systems.
• Develop datasets and evaluation strategies through data curation, exploratory analysis, feature engineering, error analysis, ground-truth development, and offline evaluation.
• Design model experiments, benchmarks, and A/B tests covering quality, safety, reliability, latency, scalability, and business impact.
• Apply post-training, fine-tuning, retrieval, prompting, and other optimization techniques for production use cases.
• Translate customer and business opportunities into technical requirements, success metrics, and deployable solutions with product, engineering, data, and business partners.
• Deploy, monitor, and iterate on models in large-scale production environments; communicate recommendations and mentor junior scientists and engineers.

Requirements

• Minimum qualification options: a bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field plus 3 years of analytics-related experience; or a master’s degree in one of these fields plus 1 year of analytics-related experience; or 5 years of experience in an analytics or related field.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Python, machine learning, deep learning, NLP, information retrieval, computer vision, multimodal AI, and model evaluation.
• Ability to translate customer and business needs into model designs, experiments, technical requirements, and scalable production solutions, and communicate findings and tradeoffs across technical and business stakeholders.
• Experience adapting open-weight models through model selection, post-training, fine-tuning, and evaluation for LLM, vision, multimodal, and agent-based systems.
• Experience benchmarking models, participating in A/B tests, and optimizing training and inference architectures for quality, cost, latency, throughput, scalability, and reliability.
• Experience creating retail training and evaluation data, including dataset sourcing and curation, unsupervised or weakly supervised learning, synthetic data, ground-truth development, crowdsourcing, and annotation partners.
• Experience with distributed training and inference, large-scale model serving, massively parallel GPU systems, AI coding assistants, and production agentic AI applications.

Nice to have

• 4+ years of experience building machine learning models or algorithms for business applications.
• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, Engineering, Robotics, Operations Research, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with LLM post-training and alignment, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, RLHF, DPO, or related techniques.
• Experience with image or video generation models, multimodal understanding models, or production computer-vision systems.
• Experience building, evaluating, and operating LLM- or agent-based systems at production scale.
• Successful completion of assessments in Python, Spark, Scala, or R; experience with open-source frameworks such as scikit-learn, TensorFlow, or Torch.
• Knowledge of WCAG 2.2 AA, assistive technologies, digital accessibility practices, and inclusive product development.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, vision, and dental coverage, 401(k), stock purchase, company-paid life insurance, and disability benefits.
• Paid time off, including sick leave, parental leave, family care leave, bereavement, jury duty, voting leave, vacation, and holidays.
• Company discounts, military leave pay, and adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement.
• Live Better U provides Walmart-paid education programs, including high school completion, bachelor’s degrees, English language learning, and certificates; tuition, books, and fees are covered.
• Benefits and eligibility depend on job classification and length of employment and may be subject to plan terms.