Distinguished, Software Engineer

Position: (USA) Distinguished, Software Engineer
Reference: R-2479315

Posted:

Location:

BENTONVILLE, AR, United States; SUNNYVALE, CASalary: $130000 - $260000/year

Type:
Full time / Regular/Permanent Company:
Walmart Business Segment:
Home Office As a Distinguished Engineer for the Colony Platform in the AI & Data organization, you will be a senior individual contributor and technical leader responsible for shaping the long-term technical vision, architecture, and engineering excellence of our enterprise-scale AI/ML systems and platforms. You will work across teams to influence complex technical decisions, embed responsible AI foundations, and deliver scalable, resilient solutions that empower builders across Walmart.
This role goes beyond hands-on engineering — it is about driving technical strategy, architecting for scale, and mentoring technical leaders to elevate engineering standards across the organization. What You’ll Do Technical Vision & Architecture
Define and drive the technical vision for AI/ML platforms and ecosystems that operate at enterprise scale.
Lead architecture reviews and design principles across GenAI integrations, model serving, and intelligent pipelines.
Set architectural standards for reliability, security, scalability, and performance that align with enterprise requirements.
Translate complex business needs into high-impact, long-term technical roadmaps.
AI/ML Technical Leadership
Provide hands-on technical guidance and thought leadership to multi-team engineering and data science groups.
Influence AI/ML lifecycle practices, including model evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and observability.
Shape patterns for safe and governed AI adoption across internal platforms.
Lead cutting-edge prototyping and production strategies for mission-critical AI systems. Cross–Functional Collaboration
Partner with product, business, UX, data science, infrastructure, and governance teams to accelerate value delivery.
Advocate engineering best practices and foster alignment across diverse technology domains.
Influence senior stakeholders, including executives, on technical trade-offs and strategic decisions.
Engineering Excellence & Mentorship
Raise engineering excellence by mentoring senior ICs, principal engineers, and emerging technical talent.
Champion best practices in code quality, system reliability, CI/CD pipelines, and operational maturity.
Sponsor and drive technical communities of practice that elevate standards across AI & Data.

What You’ll Bring

Required Qualifications
10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale, distributed software systems.
Proven track record as a senior individual contributor driving system architecture or technical strategy.
Deep experience with AI/ML systems productionization, model serving, orchestration, and performance considerations.

Experience with observability: structured logging, metrics, traces, and debugging distributed flows across client + gateway.
Strong expertise in scalable cloud-native design and platform engineering.
Demonstrated ability to influence engineers and leaders without direct managerial authority.
Excellent communication and technical storytelling skills, with the ability to articulate complex concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications
Experience leading AI/ML systems or platforms in a large enterprise environment.

Experience with LLM tool-calling / agentic systems (structured tool invocation, schema validation, prompt/tool definition design, guardrails).

Experience with schema/contract frameworks (JSON Schema, OpenAPI, Pydantic, protobuf) and backward-compatible tool evolution.
Familiarity with responsible AI practices and governance frameworks.

Experience with GenAI, prompt engineering patterns, or large-scale inference…