Principal Data Engineer

Role Overview

• Drive the execution of multiple business plans and projects by identifying customer and operational needs
• Develop and communicate business plans and priorities
• Provide supervision and development opportunities for associates by selecting and training, mentoring, assigning duties
• Evaluate the ongoing effectiveness of current plans, programs, and initiatives
• Promote and support company policies, procedures, mission, values, and standards of ethics and integrity
• Consult with business partners, managers, co-workers, or other key stakeholders
• Solicit, evaluate, and apply suggestions for improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness
• Participate in and support community outreach events
• Transform and evolve Walmart’s core data platform using Agentic AI
• Develop data platforms that scale to billions of events per day
• Influence multiple teams and organizations through technical leadership and clear architectural direction without direct authority
• Mentor Staff and Senior Engineers across Walmart Global Tech AI and Data team
• Design, build, test, and deploy cutting-edge solutions at scale, impacting multi-billion-dollar business
• Collaborate with product owner and technical lead on overall delivery of assigned projects/enhancements

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related discipline with 12+ years’ experience
• Minimum 10 years of experience in Big Data and distributed computing
• Minimum 10 years of experience programming in Java, Scala, Python, Spring Boot & Node.js
• Strong experience with cloud‑native ecosystems (GCP), including BigQuery, Serverless, Pub/Sub, or equivalent
• Expertise in batch and streaming technologies (Kafka, Spark Structured Streaming, Flink, Druid, etc.)
• Experience working with hybrid architectures that support both real‑time operations and analytical workloads
• Strong understanding of semantic modeling, embeddings, knowledge graphs, and vector indexing
• Experience supporting RAG, context‑aware AI, and agent orchestration through data platform design
• Ability to reason about schema design, latency, storage formats, and their impact on AI behavior and outcomes
• Fluency in Python, Java, or Scala
• Deep experience with Spark/PySpark and large‑scale SQL optimization
• Strong systems thinking, performance tuning, and operational excellence mindset
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence in complex, matrixed organizations
• Executive‑level communication skills, with the ability to connect technical strategy to business and customer impact
• Proven experience building pipelines on Big Data Technologies/Stack – Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Presto, Kafka, Airflow Scheduler and GCP suite of data tools
• Deep understanding of the Hadoop ecosystem and strong conceptual knowledge in Hadoop architecture components
• Strong knowledge of deploying and managing applications in GCP
• Strong scripting skills to process large amounts of data and highly proficient in SQL.

Tech Stack

• Airflow
• BigQuery
• Cloud
• Google Cloud Platform
• Hadoop
• Java
• JavaScript
• Kafka
• Node.js
• PySpark
• Python
• Scala
• Spark
• Spring
• Spring Boot
• SpringBoot
• SQL

Benefits

• Incentive awards for performance
• Maternity and parental leave
• PTO
• Health benefits