Senior Data Scientist: Associate AI

Position Summary

We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist to provide technical leadership and long‑term vision for next‑generation AI systems and platforms. This senior individual contributor will drive breakthrough system design and advanced solution development that transforms Walmart  role combines deep technical expertise (ML, simulation, optimization, agentic AI) with cross‑functional influence, mentoring of senior talent, and delivery of high‑impact, productionized solutions. You will be a great fit if: you architect end‑to‑end ML/AI systems — from feature engineering through production deployment and monitoring, you’ve built and shipped multiple autonomous AI agents (not just experimented with LLM APIs), you’re Level 5+ on Steve Yegge’s Vibe Coding scale and can ship production systems through AI‑assisted development, and you combine deep statistical rigor with practical business impact.

The Associate AI Experiences team applies advanced data science, machine learning, and agentic AI to solve high‑impact business problems across Walmart globally. You’ll build production Agentic systems, deploy autonomous AI agents, and translate complex data into actionable insights that drive measurable business value at massive scale. Our team builds intelligent platforms, agents and ML‑powered solutions that make associates’ jobs easier, faster, and more fulfilling across stores, fulfillment centers, distribution centers, and home office.

We leverage the Element LLM Gateway to safely access state‑of‑the‑art language models while keeping all data within Walmart’s network. Our work spans NLP, computer vision, time series forecasting, and multi‑agent AI systems at enterprise scale.

• Build and deploy production ML systems end-to-end: data pipelines, feature stores, model training, serving layers, monitoring, and feedback loops at scale
• Provide technical vision and lead advanced development in agentic AI, reinforcement learning, and simulation
• Architect and deploy large‑scale AI systems and autonomous AI agents — conversational assistants, predictive agents with tool‑calling, and multi‑agent orchestration systems using Lang Chain, Pydantic AI, and RAG patterns
• Design agentic evaluation frameworks that benchmark agent performance across task completion, code quality, and multi‑step reasoning accuracy
• Deploy NLP pipelines at enterprise scale — semantic similarity across millions of records using BERT/SBERT embeddings and vector search (FAISS)
• Lead high‑impact projects end-to-end; problem framing, modeling, prototyping, production architecture, and rollout
• Author and review technical designs and standards; present findings to senior leadership
• Mentor senior scientists and engineers on advanced modeling techniques, feature engineering, and experimentation design — raising the technical bar across teams
• Establish best practices for model validations, experimentation, and safe deployment of AI systems
• Influence roadmap prioritization and long‑term strategy for AI and simulation capabilities
• Present insights to senior leadership with compelling data visualization, quantified business impact, and clear confidence intervals

• Experience building and deploying AI/ML solutions in production environments
• Strong proficiency in Python and common ML libraries (scikit‑learn, XGBoost/Light
  
  GBM, PyTorch/Tensor Flow)
• Demonstrated AI/ML engineering experience
• Pipeline orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect)
• Model packaging/serving (FastAPI, Bento
  
  ML, Torch Serve)
• Containerization and deployment (Docker, Kubernetes)
• CI/CD and testing practices for AI/ML
• Monitoring, observability (model metrics, drift, logging)
• Solid understanding of statistics, experimental design, and causal/measurement thinking
• Experience with agentic AI / LLM systems including tool/function calling and agent orchestration framework (Lang Graph/Lang Chain, Semantic Kernel, Llama Index, custom orchestrators)
• Prompt strategies, structured outputs, and reliability techniques
• RAG design and optimization
• LLM/agent evaluation methodologies
• Strong SQL skills and experience working with large‑scale datasets
• Ability to translate complex analytical…