Distinguished, Data Scientist - Agent-Led Engagement in Conversational Commerce

Distinguished, Data Scientist - Agent-Led Engagement in Conversational Commerce

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This range is provided by Walmart. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

$/yr - $/yr

Position Summary.

What you’ll do:

Walmart’s Next Gen Commerce team is building intelligent, proactive shopping agents that go beyond answering customer questions—they drive conversations that are timely, personalized, and value‑generating. As a Distinguished Data Scientist for Agent‑Led Engagement, you will serve as the key IC partner to the Director of Data Science for this space. You will lead the technical vision, model development, and execution strategy behind proactive engagement in Walmart’s conversational AI experiences.

Your focus will be to design and implement systems that empower agents to initiate, sustain, and deepen customer conversations. You’ll build models that combine large language models, structured behavior signals, and long‑term customer memory to make real‑time decisions about when, how, and why to engage. This work sits at the intersection of language understanding, user modeling, decision science, and personalization.

It is a hands‑on, high‑impact IC role requiring deep technical expertise and cross‑functional influence. You will work closely with the data science team, as well as engineering, product, design and other internal teams to move fast, experiment boldly, and build systems that shape how millions of customers interact with Walmart every day.

• Design and implement models that drive agent‑led engagement—including topic suggestion, conversation continuation, and goal‑driven nudges—based on short‑term context and long‑term user understanding
• Develop LLM‑based and hybrid (LLM + traditional ML) systems that detect high‑value moments to engage and select relevant actions or content
• Build real‑time ranking and decision systems that incorporate customer history, behavioral signals, and conversational state
• Define and prototype memory architectures that support persistent customer profiles and dynamic, evolving preferences
• Collaborate with platform and infra teams to integrate memory and decision modules into the end‑to‑end conversational stack
• Partner with product, UX, and engineering to surface proactive suggestions naturally and meaningfully within conversations
• Contribute to experimentation and evaluation frameworks to measure engagement, relevance, conversion, and long‑term impact
• Review system‑level decisions for safety, user experience, and brand alignment
• Act as a technical thought partner and advisor to the Director of Agent‑Led Engagement and other senior leaders in agentic AI

• 7+ years of experience in data science, applied AI, or machine learning, with deep focus on personalization, conversational AI, or decision systems
• Demonstrated technical leadership in LLM‑driven experiences, customer engagement modeling, or agentic applications
• Strong expertise in hybrid modeling (LLM + structured ML), dialogue state modeling, or sequential decision‑making
• Experience designing or contributing to persistent memory systems for user modeling
• Proven ability to turn ideas into deployed, production‑scale systems with measurable impact
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with experience driving alignment across science, product, and engineering teams

• Ph.D. or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field
• Experience in conversational commerce, recommendation systems, or task‑oriented dialog agents
• Familiarity with contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, or user modeling at scale
• Experience working with memory‑augmented LLMs or long‑context transformer systems
• Track record of open‑source contributions, publications, patents, or public speaking in applied AI or NLP

Why Join Us? You’ll help define how AI shifts from reactive to proactive—from answering questions to anticipating needs. Your work will power intelligent agents that not only understand but guide, support, and elevate how customers shop s…