Distinguished, Software Engineer

Position Summary

As a Distinguished Engineer in the AI & Data organization, you will serve as 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.

What You'll Do

• 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.
• Establish architectural standards for reliability, security, scalability, and performance aligned with enterprise requirements.
• Translate complex business needs into high-impact, long-term technical roadmaps.
• 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.
• Partner with product, business, UX, data science, infrastructure, and governance teams to accelerate value delivery.
• Advocate for engineering best practices and foster alignment across diverse technology domains.
• Influence senior stakeholders, including executives, on technical trade-offs and strategic decisions.
• Elevate 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 to raise standards across AI & Data.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ 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 production systems, model serving, orchestration, and performance optimization.
• Experience with observability practices, including structured logging, metrics, traces, and debugging distributed flows across client and gateway environments.
• 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 both technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading AI/ML systems or platforms in a large enterprise environment.
• Experience with LLM tool-calling or agentic systems (e.g., structured tool invocation, schema validation, prompt/tool design, guardrails).
• Familiarity with schema/contract frameworks (JSON Schema, OpenAPI, Pydantic, protobuf) and backward-compatible tool evolution.
• Knowledge of responsible AI practices and governance frameworks.
• Experience with GenAI, prompt engineering patterns, or large-scale inference infrastructure.
• Proven mentorship and leadership across multiple engineering teams.