About the role

Principal Data Scientist at Walmart driving breakthrough system design and advanced AI solution development. Leading high-impact projects in the Associate AI Experiences team with a global reach.

Responsibilities

Build and deploy production ML systems end-to-end: data pipelines, feature stores, model training, serving layers, monitoring, and feedback loops at scale.
Provide technical vision and lead advanced development in agentic AI, reinforcement learning, and simulation.
Architect and deploy large-scale AI systems and autonomous AI agents — conversational assistants, predictive agents with tool-calling, and multi-agent orchestration systems using LangChain, Pydantic AI, and RAG patterns.
Design agentic evaluation frameworks that benchmark agent performance across task completion, code quality, and multi-step reasoning accuracy.
Deploy NLP pipelines at enterprise scale — semantic similarity across millions of records using BERT/SBERT embeddings and vector search (FAISS).
Lead high-impact projects end-to-end; problem framing, modeling, prototyping, production architecture, and rollout.
Author and review technical designs and standards; present findings to senior leadership.
Mentor senior scientists and engineers on advanced modeling techniques, feature engineering, and experimentation design - raising the technical bar across teams.
Establish best practices for model validations, experimentation, and safe deployment of AI systems.
Influence roadmap prioritization and long-term strategy for AI and simulation capabilities.
Present insights to senior leadership with compelling data visualization, quantified business impact, and clear confidence intervals.

Minimum Qualifications: Masters degree in Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years’ experience in data science or Machine Learning roles with demonstrated impact.
Preferred Qualifications: PhD in AI, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Information Technology, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Econometrics, or related field with relevant industry experience.
Deep expertise in ML algorithms (XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM, Random Forest, AutoML) and deep learning (PyTorch, transformer architectures).
Production experience with NLP (BERT, SBERT, FAISS, RAG), computer vision (YOLO, CLIP), and time series forecasting (ARIMA, Prophet).
Hands-on experience building and orchestrating multiple AI agents with LangChain, RAG, tool integration, and memory management.
Multi-cloud ML platform proficiency — AWS SageMaker AND GCP (Vertex AI, BigQuery, BigQuery ML).
Strong Python skills (Pandas, NumPy, Scikit-learn) with containerization (Docker) and MLOps practices.
Advanced statistical analysis, experiment design, and causal inference.
Experience deploying production-grade AI systems at scale.
Ability to translate complex analytical results into clear business recommendations for non-technical stakeholders.

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.
Live Better U is a Walmart-paid education benefit program for full-time and part-time associates in Walmart and Sam's Club facilities.