Principal, Data Scientist Agentic AI

Position: Principal, Data Scientist -- Agentic AI
Position Summary...

About Walmart Data Ventures

Walmart Scintilla is a commercial data and AI platform powering the suppliers of the world's largest retailer. With access to one of the most diverse and scaled data ecosystems anywhere, we transform the data of Fortune 1 company into insight, recommendation, and innovation that drives impact for customers, merchants, and suppliers.

Our teams are pioneering the use of Generative AI, agentic intelligence, and advanced machine learning to reimagine customer experiences, optimize operations, and unlock new business models. For external candidates, it's a chance to join a team that is shaping the future of retail AI and setting industry benchmarks.

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Data Scientist to shape the future of Generative AI and Agentic AI s role is a highly specialized Applied Science position, requiring a deep fusion of cutting-edge applied science and scalable production system delivery. Building on our public vision of "Four Super Agents", you will architect and scale next-generation ML and LLM systems that power both customer-facing experiences and enterprise operations.

You will drive innovation at the intersection of applied science, engineering, and platform strategy-pushing the boundaries of what large-scale AI can do in production.

What you'll do...

What You'll Do

Our team is driving high-impact enterprise initiatives, including recommendation platforms, customer voice, market research, product innovation, customer attitudinal segmentation, agent based simulations, and many more. These initiatives require advanced expertise in the following capabilities:
GenAI & Agentic AI Innovation

Architect and build agentic AI systems with capabilities such as planning, memory, tool-use, and multi-agent collaboration, ensuring seamless integration with Walmart's digital ecosystem.

Define best practices for LLMOps, including prompt versioning, embedding store management, synthetic data generation, fine-tuning strategies, and continuous evaluation for safety, accuracy, and bias.

Drive applied research in large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal AI, leveraging methods such as LoRA/PEFT fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF/DPO), quantization, and speculative decoding.

Explore and operationalize RAG pipelines, deep research, multimodal fusion, and specialized architectures for language, vision, time series, and beyond.

ML & Applied Science Foundations

Translate ambiguous, high-impact business problems into scalable AI/ML solutions with measurable outcomes.

Build and guide end-to-end ML systems covering data sourcing, feature engineering, model training, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.

Champion advanced MLOps practices: automated pipelines, CI/CD for ML, model versioning, drift detection, and telemetry-based monitoring.

Ensure models meet standards of fairness, explainability, and responsible AI compliance.

Leadership & Influence

Serve as a technical leader and mentor, guiding senior engineers and applied scientists to build depth and expertise.

Influence cross-functional platform strategy, ensuring AI systems align with Walmart's broader product and engineering vision.

Contribute to Walmart's AI reputation through thought leadership-publishing, presenting, and showcasing innovations internally and externally.

What We're Looking For Above all, we're looking for a leader defined by curiosity and the resilience to thrive in complex, innovative, and high-uncertainty environments. The ideal Principal has a deep technical science and engineering background-mastery of algorithmic thinking and strong coding skills-even if they haven't mastered every agentic technology on day one. We value the efficient use of AI coding assistants but expect strong, independent coding prowess.

Your willingness to work hard and quickly get up to speed on new domains is the most critical asset. If you have the foundational strength and the drive to lead our next-era AI journey in retail, we encourage you to apply.

Core Qualifications

Deep expertise in Generative AI, LLMs, and/or Agentic AI systems (e.g., LLMOps, fine-tuning, RAG, multi-agent orchestration).

Strong applied science background with the ability to design, experiment, and deploy cutting-edge ML models in production.

Proven experience architecting large-scale ML/AI platforms with attention to performance, scalability, and maintainability.

Strong programming and ML tooling skills (Python; PyTorch/Tensor Flow).

Familiarity with Agentic development platforms (Google ADK, Lang Graph, CrewAI, Auto Gen).

Track record of technical leadership, mentoring, and influencing architectural decisions across teams.

Nice-to-Haves

Experience with broader ML ecosystems:
Scikit-learn, Spark ML, XGBoost, or programming languages such as Java, C++, SQL, R.

Familiarity with advanced optimization methods (e.g., distributed training, model compression, ONNX interoperability).

Exposure to multimodal systems (vision, speech, time series).

Strong…