Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Our eCommerce Search team is an integral part of Walmart International, which encompasses over 5,200 retail units across 23 countries. We are dedicated to building a cutting-edge machine learning platform that addresses the unique needs of customers, associates, and the business. Our mission is to enhance the shopping experience for millions of customers worldwide by leveraging advanced technologies and innovative solutions.

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you are a technical leader working at the intersection of machine learning and software engineering. You have expertise in both areas and are responsible for the full lifecycle of complex machine learning systems from initial ideas and design to deployment, monitoring, and updates. This role requires strong technical skills, strategic planning, system design ability, and mentorship.

Senior Engineers don't just implement existing plans; they define the technical approach and architecture for systems. You will be important in setting and promoting best practices, guiding technical direction in your area, and possibly contributing to the overall engineering strategy. While your specific focus might align with roles like a Tech Lead guiding a team, an Architect defining a critical technical area, or a Solver tackling high-risk problems, the core elements are technical leadership, system-level thinking, and broad impact. You will balance hands-on work with system design and technical guidance.

What you'll do:

• End-to-End ML System Development: Lead the design, development, implementation, testing, and deployment of reliable and scalable machine learning systems and infrastructure. This includes building and optimizing components such as model training and validation workflows, and efficient model serving systems. You will contribute to the system lifecycle, ensuring its reliability and maintainability.
• Technical Contribution & Guidance: Contribute to the definition of the technical strategy and system architecture for significant machine learning projects. Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other engineers on the team, promoting engineering best practices. You will participate in making key design decisions, considering trade-offs like complexity, performance, cost, and maintainability.
• Software Engineering Proficiency: Apply strong software engineering practices throughout the ML development process. Promote and utilize practices for writing clean, modular, tested, and maintainable code. Utilize best practices for version control (Git), automated testing, and continuous integration and deployment.
• Collaboration & Communication: Effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product managers, data scientists, and other engineers, to understand requirements and deliver impactful solutions. Clearly communicate technical concepts and project progress to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Troubleshooting business and production issues by reviewing and analyzing information (for example, issue, impact, criticality, possible root cause); engaging support teams to assist in the resolution of issues; formulating an action plan; directing actions as designated in the plan; interpreting the results to determine further action; performs root cause analysis to prevent future occurrence of issues; and completing online documentation.

What you'll bring:

• Large-Scale Data Platforms: Experience with distributed data processing tools like Apache Spark and cloud data platforms like Snowflake or Databricks.
• MLOps Tooling: Experience with MLOps tools for experiment tracking (e.g., MLflow), orchestration (e.g., Kubeflow Pipelines, Airflow), model registries, and CI/CD for ML.
• Infrastructure & Cloud: Experience designing, building, and managing microservices. Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes). Experience with a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Advanced ML Areas: Knowledge in specific ML areas relevant to our work, such as Recommender Systems, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), Computer Vision, Reinforcement Learning, or Causal ML.
• Leadership & Community: Experience in technical leadership beyond specific projects, like leading technical groups, significant open-source contributions, or publications.
• 5+ years of experience in developing and deploying machine learning systems in a production environment.
• Experience in building n-tier highly scalable, fault tolerant, reactive Microservices using Java/Scala, and RESTful architecture.
• Strong understanding of machine learning algorithms, data modeling, and evaluation metrics.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python.
• Experience with relevant ML frameworks and libraries (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn).
• Experience building and managing data pipelines and feature stores.
• Solid understanding of software engineering principles and best practices.
• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) is a plus.

About Walmart Global Tech: Imagine working in an environment where one line of code can make life easier for hundreds of millions of people. That's what we do at Walmart Global Tech. We're a team of software engineers, data scientists, cybersecurity experts and service professionals within the world's leading retailers who make an epic impact and are at the forefront of the next retail disruption. People are why we innovate, and people power our innovations. We are people-led and tech-empowered. We train our team in the skillsets of the future and bring in experts like you to help us grow. We have roles for those chasing their first opportunity as well as those looking for the opportunity that will define their career. Here, you can kickstart a great career in tech, gain new skills and experience for virtually every industry, or leverage your expertise to innovate on a scale that impacts millions and reimagine the future of retail.

Flexible, hybrid work: We use a hybrid way of working that is primarily in office coupled with virtual when not onsite. Our campuses serve as a hub to enhance collaboration, bring us together for purpose and deliver on business needs. This approach helps us make quicker decisions, remove the location barriers across our global team and be more flexible in our personal lives.

Benefits: Beyond our great compensation package, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include 401(k) match, stock purchase plan, paid maternity and parental leave, PTO, multiple health plans, and much more. Equal Opportunity Employer: Walmart, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer By Choice. We believe we are best equipped to help our associates, customers and the communities we serve live better when we really know them. That means understanding, respecting and valuing belonging - unique styles, experiences, identities, ideas and opinions while being inclusive of all people.

Minimum Qualifications: Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 3 years' experience in software engineering or related area. Option 2: 5 years' experience in software engineering or related area.

Preferred Qualifications: Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computer Information Systems, Software Engineering, or related area and 1 year's experience in software engineering or related area.

Primary Location: 640 W California Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94086-4828, United States of America