Software Engineer, Backend Developer, AI Engineer (Applied​/Software)

Position: Staff, Software Engineer
Position Summary...

What you'll do...

Role summary:

As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll be a technical-leader who defines the direction for and evolves the backend micro-services, data pipelines, and ML-serving infrastructure that power search 'll lead a team of 6-10 engineers, set technical vision for critical systems, navigate complex cross-functional initiatives, and drive the quality bar. You'll spend your days writing and reviewing code, leading design discussions, and making architectural decisions that shape the next-generation of Walmart Search.

We're in an active phase of platform modernization, redesigning and refactoring core systems. If you want to build, not just maintain, this is the time to join.

About the team:

The eCommerce Search team owns the end-to-end stack powering product search and discovery across Walmart's global eCommerce channels. backed by micro-services, large-scale data/feature pipelines, search engines, and ML-serving infrastructure. We handle millions of queries daily, your work will shape how millions of customers find products.

Our systems tackle:

* Query & Intent Understanding - product type classification, intent recognition, and sequence tagging (NLP and deep learning)

* Autocomplete - real-time query suggestions at low-latency

* Retrieval - Complex query construction, faceted navigation, semantic and lexical retrieval

* Ranking - multi-phase ML models (LTR/Neural) optimizing for customer satisfaction

* Data & Feature Pipelines - feeding search indices, feature stores, and analytics platforms.

What you'll do:

* Own technical direction for search micro-services
-Core Orchestration & Retrieval, Query-Understanding, Autocomplete, Facet-Navigation, and more.

* Design, build and optimize high-throughput, low-latency services, applying best practices around distributed systems, fault-tolerance, and concurrency

* Architect complex query patterns with search engines to power relevance.

* Design data and feature pipelines within the search ecosystem

* Lead discovery and design for medium-to-large initiatives - partnering with product, data science to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions

* Drive proof-of-concepts, and validate ideas through prototypes.

* Run A/B experiments; measuring impact on search quality and business metrics

* Mentor engineers and foster excellence.

* Collaborate with data scientists to product ionize ML Models.

* Own production reliability - observability, on-call, RCA's.

What you'll bring:

* 10+ years of experience designing and shipping production code in large-scale distributed systems - including RESTful API design, fault-tolerance, and horizontal scaling.

* Deep expertise in backend development (Java and Spring Boot a plus) with strong object-oriented design fundamentals.

* Hands-on experience building data/feature pipelines using streaming/batch techniques - with proficiency in technologies similar to Spark, Kafka, Hive, GCP, and Cassandra.

* Track record technically leading teams, setting architectural direction, mentoring, and raising quality bar through code reviews.

* Strong communication skills - creating clarity from ambiguity, articulating technical trade-offs to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders, and influencing across teams.

* Familiarity with ML model integration and machine learning ecosystem.

At Walmart, we offer competitive pay as well as performance-based bonus awards and other great benefits for a happier mind, body, and wallet. Health benefits include medical, vision and dental coverage. Financial benefits include 401(k), stock purchase and company-paid life insurance. Paid time off benefits include PTO (including sick leave), parental leave, family care leave, bereavement, jury duty, and voting. Other benefits include short-term and long-term disability, company discounts, Military Leave Pay, adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, and more.

You will also receive PTO and/or PPTO that can be used for vacation, sick leave, holidays, or other purposes. The amount you receive depends on your job classification and length of employment. It will meet or exceed the requirements of paid sick leave laws,…