PRINCIPAL, DATA SCIENTIST (GENAI)

Position Summary...

What you'll do...

About Team:        

Walmart is a multi-national people led tech powered omnichannel retailer with over 2.2M associates. At People Support Tech, EBS we help, support and empower the Walmart’s HR function with AI and GenAI solutions to improve productivity, harnessing the opportunities for growth, focusing on well-being and cultivating cultures of belonging for all Walmart's associates. Our team is responsible for transforming the People Help Center experience that is being leveraged by 2.2M associates through different voice and chat channels.  

The vision is to deliver a radically efficient, deeply empathetic People Services experience where associates get what they need the first time—with clarity, speed, and zero unnecessary effort. By leveraging AI, the system anticipates and resolves associates’ queries on HR functions like Benefits, Payroll etc. before they become human contacts, ensuring proactive support for associates. Additionally, human agents are empowered with context, judgment support, and automation, allowing them to deliver faster, more accurate assistance while focusing on meaningful interactions. This approach enhances productivity, cultivates a culture of belonging, and completely transforms the HR Help Center Experience for all Walmart's associates. 

The People Support Tech team is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Principal Data Scientist to lead the development of self-service, AI-powered voice and chat experiences for Walmart associates. In this individual contributor role, you will bring deep hands-on expertise and a strong passion for building production-grade AI/ML and GenAI products. You will design and develop LLM-powered conversational and agentic AI systems that enable autonomous, multi-step problem solving across HR and People Support workflows, significantly improving associate experience and productivity. The role involves building enterprise-scale GenAI solutions, designing and developing supporting microservices, and integrating AI capabilities with existing enterprise systems and platforms. You will collaborate closely with data scientists, machine learning engineers, and software engineers in a highly integrated environment. You will play a pivotal role in shaping the technical direction of our AI platforms by defining system architectures, modeling and evaluation strategies, and ensuring solutions meet high standards for robustness, scalability, and responsible AI. Additionally, the role includes providing hands-on technical leadership and mentorship to data scientists and ML engineers, working closely with cross-functional partners, and upholding strong engineering and modeling standards through thoughtful design, experimentation, and code reviews. 

What you’ll do 

• This is a critical, high-impact role with significant growth opportunities. From day one, you will be trusted to drive outcomes aligned with organizational goals and lead the evolution of AI-powered self-service experiences. Key responsibilities include, but are not limited to: 
• Collaborate closely with data scientists, machine learning engineers, and software engineers to design, architect, build, deploy, operate, and optimize production-grade AI/ML and GenAI systems 
• Design end-to-end architectures for GenAI, agentic AI, and data-intensive applications, ensuring scalability, observability, reliability, security, and responsible AI compliance 
• Design and build self-service voice and chat AI systems, including LLM-powered conversational and agentic experiences that support autonomous, multi-step task execution across People Support workflows 
• Construct and evolve multi-agent intelligent workflows, translating natural language inputs into goal-directed actions using orchestration frameworks, tools, and robust state and memory management 
• Design and develop supporting microservices for AI systems, and integrate them with existing enterprise platforms, APIs, and workflows 
• Develop, deploy, and operate production-grade real-time and batch ML/GenAI services, supporting low-latency inference, orchestration, and fault-tolerant execution 
• Partner with product managers to design user journeys, feedback loops, and telemetry strategies, and analyze user behavior to continuously improve system and agent outcomes 
• Define and own comprehensive evaluation strategies for GenAI and agentic systems, including offline and online evaluation, task success metrics, grounding and hallucination detection, latency and cost controls, A/B testing, and user outcome measurement 
• Identify and propose AI/ML and agentic AI use cases that improve business processes, and rapidly build MVPs and POCs to help stakeholders assess feasibility and impact 
• Mentor and guide data scientists and ML engineers, helping grow technical depth, system thinking, and business context within the team 
• Define and drive responsible AI practices, including safety guardrails, monitoring, governance, explainability, and human-in-the-loop mechanisms to ensure trustworthy AI in production 
• Collaborate with applied researchers and platform teams to iteratively improve models, prompts, tools, memory strategies, and MLOps practices 

What you’ll bring 

• 13+ years of professional experience designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining scalable, production-grade AI/ML and GenAI systems 
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, statistics, mathematics, economics, or a related quantitative field 
• Strong industry experience building production AI/ML systems, preferably at large technology companies or AI-native startups 
• Extensive experience writing high-quality, production-grade Python code, with strong software engineering fundamentals 
• Deep expertise in statistical analysis and machine learning, using frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or equivalent 
• Hands-on experience building GenAI systems, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), prompt engineering, orchestration, and retrieval strategies 
• Demonstrated experience developing conversational AI systems, such as chatbots, virtual assistants, or dialogue-driven applications, with a strong understanding of NLP, intent handling, and multi-turn conversation design 
• Experience managing conversational state, memory, and context, including session persistence, personalization, and long-lived interactions 
• Experience designing and deploying agentic AI systems, including multi-agent workflows, tool use, autonomous task execution, and failure handling 
• Demonstrated experience defining evaluation and measurement strategies for GenAI systems, including LLM quality assessment, RAG effectiveness, agent behavior validation, continuous monitoring, and experimentation in production 
• Experience building and scaling distributed machine learning systems, including training, inference, and serving 
• Familiarity with microservices architectures and enterprise system integration, including API-based communication and collaboration with backend platforms 
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and orchestration, including Git and Kubernetes 
• Ability to execute and advocate for responsible AI practices with stakeholders across the enterprise 
• Strong mentorship and technical leadership skills, with experience guiding engineers and data scientists through complex and ambiguous problems 
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts and insights to both technical and non-technical audiences 
• A research-driven, detail-oriented mindset, balanced with a strong bias toward execution and real-world impact 
• A collaborative, ownership-oriented approach, with a history of openness, clear communication, and timely decision-making 
• Bonus Skills 
• Experience developing, fine-tuning, or adapting large language models, including prompt optimization, RAG pipelines, or open-weight model customization 
• Experience building multi-modal GenAI or agentic systems, including voice, text, or other modalities 
• Publication history in top-tier ML/NLP conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, or ICLR 

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.

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/Chennai] 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...

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Preferred Qualifications...

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