Staff Software Engineer - Backend / ML

Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States. Hybrid work, primarily in office.

Annual salary: $143,000–$286,000, plus performance bonuses and potential stock compensation.

Company

Walmart Global Tech develops technology powering Walmart's global eCommerce operations and product discovery at massive scale.

What you will do

• Define technical direction and architecture for search microservices covering orchestration, query understanding, autocomplete, navigation, retrieval, and ranking.
• Design and optimize high-throughput, low-latency backend services using distributed-systems, fault-tolerance, scalability, concurrency, and performance principles.
• Build large-scale data and feature pipelines feeding search indices, feature stores, and downstream data platforms.
• Lead technical discovery and design with product management, data science, and UX; develop prototypes, proof-of-concepts, and scalable solutions.
• Productionize ML models and optimize model serving, MLOps, observability, monitoring, and reliability for search services.
• Technically lead, mentor, and grow a team of 6–10 engineers while contributing to roadmaps and organization-level architectural decisions.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience designing, developing, and shipping production code for large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep backend development expertise with Java and Spring Boot, including object-oriented design, concurrency, and performance optimization.
• Experience building cloud-native microservices with REST APIs and deploying them on Kubernetes.
• Experience with Apache Spark/SparkSQL, Kafka, Cassandra or other NoSQL databases, big-data analytics, and cloud object storage.
• Experience technically leading teams of 6–10 engineers, conducting design and code reviews, mentoring, and setting engineering quality standards.
• Strong testing, communication, documentation, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Nice to have

• Experience with Solr, Elasticsearch, Vespa, vector search, embeddings, information retrieval, query understanding, or multi-phase ranking.
• Machine learning experience with classification, neural networks, transformers, LLMs, PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, or XGBoost.
• Production ML infrastructure experience, including dynamic batching, TensorRT, ONNX, quantization, and large-scale training or inference pipelines.
• Python, GCP, BigQuery, and Airflow experience.
• Master's degree in a relevant computer science or software engineering field and experience with WCAG 2.2 AA and digital accessibility.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work model with campuses serving as collaboration hubs.
• 401(k) match, stock purchase plan, health, vision, and dental plans.
• Paid time off, sick leave, parental leave, family care leave, and other leave programs.
• Performance-based bonuses and potential stock compensation.
• Walmart-paid education benefits covering eligible tuition, books, and fees.