Principal, Software Engineer

Position Summary...

What you'll do...

About Team

Our team builds and operates a large-scale internal platform that provides real-time streaming, messaging, telemetry, and data-processing capabilities for Walmart technology teams. The platform supports business-critical workloads across event ingestion, stream processing, messaging, observability, large-scale persisted data processing, and data-lake use cases.
We work closely with Product Management, internal customers, and dependent engineering teams to expand platform capabilities, onboard new workloads, improve reliability and performance, and operate the platform efficiently at scale.

What you’ll do

·        Serve as a hands-on Principal Engineer, contributing directly to architecture, detailed design, coding, code reviews, debugging, testing, deployment, and production operations.

·        Own complex technical initiatives end to end, from requirements clarification and solution design through implementation, rollout, production validation, and ongoing operation.

·        Partner with Product Management to translate product direction and customer needs into scalable technical solutions within the existing platform architecture.

·        Design and evolve high-throughput event-ingestion, streaming, messaging, and telemetry systems, including efficient batching, routing, serialization, compression, secure data handling, and data delivery.

·        Build and improve large-scale real-time and persisted data-processing solutions using technologies such as Apache Spark, Spark Structured Streaming, Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, and comparable distributed technologies.

·        Identify and resolve significant issues involving latency, data-processing delays, scalability, reliability, performance, data integrity, and resource utilization, driving important problems from investigation through permanent production improvement.

·        Engineer systems for resiliency and failure recovery, including retries, backpressure, fault isolation, failover, fallback strategies, disaster recovery, and prevention of silent data loss.

·        Design for efficient use of compute, memory, network, and storage resources, and drive measurable cost improvements while maintaining or improving system performance and reliability.

·        Build and improve large-scale data pipelines and data-lake capabilities, including ingestion, transformation, ETL, partitioning, storage, querying, and data-quality diagnostics.

·        Drive operational excellence through observability, metrics, distributed telemetry, dashboards, alerting, profiling, capacity planning, peak-traffic readiness, incident response, Root Cause Analysis, and disaster-recovery exercises.

·        Improve engineering productivity and production reliability through CI/CD automation, Kubernetes-based deployments, release engineering, configuration management, and secure credential and secret management.

·        Collaborate with infrastructure, messaging, platform, data, application, and other dependent teams to resolve technical dependencies and drive cross-team initiatives to completion.

·        Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, debugging, benchmarking, technical documentation, and hands-on engineering guidance.

·        Develop a deep understanding of the existing platform, deliver meaningful improvements within its architecture, and use production experience and data to guide thoughtful architectural evolution over time.

·        Participate in the team’s production on-call rotation, including weekend coverage, and provide technical leadership during complex production incidents.

What you’ll bring

 

·        Deep experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems with demanding throughput, latency, scalability, availability, and reliability requirements.

·        Strong hands-on software engineering skills with deep proficiency in Java and at least one additional systems or backend programming language. Hands-on experience with Go is strongly preferred.

·        Strong experience with Apache Kafka or comparable messaging technologies, including event-driven architectures, partitioning, producer behavior, delivery semantics, retries, failure handling, and secure connectivity.

·        Strong experience with Apache Spark / Structured Streaming, Apache Flink, or comparable large-scale streaming and data-processing technologies.

·        Experience building high-volume event-ingestion, telemetry, or data-processing systems, with an understanding of batching, serialization, compression, encryption, routing, and efficient data movement.

·        Strong big-data engineering experience including data lakes, ETL, ingestion, partitioning, large-scale storage, batch processing, and querying large datasets.

·        Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve complex performance, latency, data-delay, scalability, reliability, and data-loss problems in production.

·        Strong understanding of distributed-system resiliency, including retries, backpressure, fault isolation, failover, fallback strategies, capacity planning, and disaster recovery.

·        Demonstrated experience improving the performance and cost efficiency of large-scale systems through better architecture, workload design, resource utilization, and data-processing strategies.

·        Strong production observability experience using technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, profiling tools, metrics, dashboards, and alerting.

·        Experience with Kubernetes, CI/CD, deployment automation, configuration management, and production release/change-management practices.

·        Experience building and operating production systems in public cloud environments. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) experience is preferred; strong AWS or Azure experience is also relevant.

·        Practical understanding of production security, including TLS, credentials, secrets, workload identity, access controls, and secure configuration management.

·        Experience with SQL and distributed query technologies such as Trino or comparable systems is valuable.

·        Strong production ownership, including incident mitigation, service restoration, Root Cause Analysis, corrective actions, operational readiness, and on-call responsibilities.

·        Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly communicate architecture, design decisions, engineering trade-offs, benchmarking results, operational procedures, and incident findings.

·        Demonstrated ability to influence engineering teams without direct management authority, resolve cross-team dependencies, navigate ambiguity, and drive complex technical work through measurable production outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

·        Experience operating streaming, messaging, telemetry, or data platforms at significant production scale.

·        Hands-on experience with Java, Rust, particularly for high-throughput or systems-oriented services and libraries.

·        Experience with Protocol Buffers, modern compression technologies, SDK development, or telemetry standards such as OpenTelemetry.

·        Experience with cloud object storage and designing alternative or fallback data-delivery paths for resilient distributed systems.

·        Experience with performance benchmarking, profiling, capacity modeling, and systematic cost optimization of compute- and data-intensive workloads.

·        Experience working in environments with disciplined production change management and multiple downstream platform consumers

About the team

Sam’s Club is our membership warehouse club, the business model that offers our members quality products at an exceptional value unmatched by traditional retail.

Sam’s Club offers highly curated assortment of items, in addition to building and leading technologies and services like Scan & Go, Club Pickup and home delivery service in select markets. Sam’s Club also offers specialty services, including travel, auto buying, pharmacy, optical, hearing aid centers, tire and battery centers and a portfolio of business operations support services.

This is the team that ensures our customers receive their orders as fast as they want and where they want, in a friction-less, predictable way. Build reusable SaaS products and services that manage Inventory of Sam’s club online order, maintaining the inventory and availability of it.

 

What you'll do:

• Develop interactive, user-friendly applications using the latest frameworks which are open source and proprietary
• build, test and deploy cutting edge solutions at scale, impacting millions of customers worldwide.
• Interact with Walmart engineering teams across geographies to leverage expertise and contribute to the tech community. 
• Engage with Product Management and Business to drive the agenda, set your priorities and deliver awesome products.

 

What will you bring:

• You hold a bachelor’s degree in computer science or related discipline with an experience of 14+ years.  
• Possess strong computer science knowledge in algorithms, data structures, database concepts.
• Thorough knowledge of Service Oriented Architecture and experience implementing RESTFUL Web Services.
• Hands on in developing web applications using REST, Kafka Messaging, Java, Spring Boot, Micro-services, and SOA.
• Experience with Java (Spring MVC, Hibernate) in building multi-threaded high performance scalable applications.
• Experience with any Cloud Computing platforms: Microsoft Azure, Google cloud or similar is must.
• Knowledge in Reactive programming Java will be given a plus.  
• Solid design and coding skills in Java and/or Spring framework.
• You be a plus if worked in the ecommerce/Retail systems software space.
• Experience building high-performance, highly available and scalable systems.
• Extensive hands-on experience building services using these technologies (Java, J2EE, Spring, Hibernate).
• Strong knowledge in data structures, SQL technologies.

 

 

About Walmart Global Tech
Imagine working in an environment where one line of code can make life easier for hundreds of millions of people.  That’s what we do at Walmart Global Tech. We’re a team of software engineers, data scientists, cybersecurity expert's and service professionals within the world’s leading retailer who make an epic impact and are at the forefront of the next retail disruption. People are why we innovate, and people power our innovations. We are people-led and tech-empowered.

We train our team in the skillsets of the future and bring in experts like you to help us grow. We have roles for those chasing their first opportunity as well as those looking for the opportunity that will define their career. Here, you can kickstart a great career in tech, gain new skills and experience for virtually every industry, or leverage your expertise to innovate at scale, impact millions and reimagine the future of retail.

 

We’re back at work

Walmart’s culture sets us apart, and we know being together helps us innovate, learn and grow great careers. This role is based in our Bangalore office for daily work, with the flexibility for associates to manage their personal lives.

Benefits

Beyond our great compensation package, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include a host of best-in-class benefits maternity and parental leave, PTO, health benefits, and much more.

 

Belonging

We aim to create a culture where every associate feels valued for who they are, rooted in respect for the individual. Our goal is to foster a sense of belonging, to create opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers, and to be a Walmart for everyone.

At Walmart, our vision is "everyone included." By fostering a workplace culture where everyone is—and feels—included, everyone wins. Our associates and customers reflect the makeup of all 19 countries where we operate. By making Walmart a welcoming place where all people feel like they belong, we’re able to engage associates, strengthen our business, improve our ability to serve customers, and support the communities where we operate.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Walmart, Inc., is an Equal Opportunities Employer – By Choice. We believe we are best equipped to help our associates, customers and the communities we serve live better when we really know them. That means understanding, respecting and valuing unique styles, experiences, identities, ideas and opinions – while being inclusive of all people.

 

Minimum Qualifications...

Outlined below are the required minimum qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no minimum qualifications.

Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 5 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.
Option 2: 7 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.

Preferred Qualifications...

Outlined below are the optional preferred qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no preferred qualifications.

Master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 3 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. The ideal candidate would have knowledge of accessibility best practices and join us as we continue to create accessible products and services following Walmart’s accessibility standards and guidelines for supporting an inclusive culture.

Primary Location...

Building 10 (sez), Cessna Business Park, Kadubeesanahalli Village, Varthur Hobli , India