Staff, Software Engineer
Position Summary
As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll define the direction for and evolve the backend micro-services, data pipelines, and ML-serving infrastructure that power search at scale. You'll lead a team of 6–10 engineers, set technical vision for critical systems, navigate complex cross-functional initiatives, and drive the quality bar.
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.
Run A/B experiments; measuring impact on search quality and business metrics.
Mentor engineers and foster excellence. Collaborate with data scientists to productionize ML Models. Own production reliability — observability, on-call, RCA's.
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 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.
Company Benefits
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.
Minimum Qualifications
Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 8 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.
Option 2: Master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 6 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.
Option 3: 10 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.
Preferred Qualifications
Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computer Information Systems, Software Engineering, or related area and 2 years' experience in software engineering or related area.
We value candidates with a background in creating inclusive digital experiences, demonstrating knowledge in implementing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standards, assistive technologies, and integrating digital accessibility seamlessly.