Principal, Data Scientist
Explicitly requires vibe coding skills (Level 5+) and shipping production systems using AI-assisted development.
About the Role
Principal Data Scientist role leading end-to-end ML system architecture and deployment at Walmart, building production machine learning systems and autonomous AI agents to generate measurable business impact at enterprise scale. The role focuses on NLP, computer vision, time-series forecasting, multi-agent AI, and translating complex data into actionable insights for global operations.
Job Description
Role
Principal Data Scientist on the Associate AI Experiences team building production ML systems and autonomous AI agents to solve high-impact business problems across Walmart’s global operations. The role spans NLP, computer vision, time-series forecasting, and multi-agent AI at enterprise scale and emphasizes shipping production systems and measurable business value.
Key Responsibilities
- Architect, build, and deploy end-to-end ML systems: data pipelines, feature stores, model training, serving layers, monitoring, and feedback loops at scale.
- Design and deploy autonomous AI agents, including conversational assistants, predictive agents with tool calling, and multi-agent orchestration using LangChain, Pydantic AI, and RAG patterns.
- Implement agentic evaluation frameworks to benchmark task completion, code quality, and multi-step reasoning.
- Deploy NLP pipelines for semantic similarity using BERT/SBERT embeddings and vector search (FAISS).
- Engineer computer vision systems for real-time inference (YOLO, RT-DETR, CLIP) with multi-GPU training optimization.
- Build time-series forecasting models for inventory optimization, demand planning, and financial projections.
- Present insights and quantified business impact to senior leadership with clear visualizations and confidence intervals.
- Mentor team members on advanced modeling techniques, feature engineering, and experimental design.
- Travel internationally to support operations in multiple countries.
Requirements (Minimum Qualifications)
- Option 1: Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field + 5 years’ analytics experience; OR
- Option 2: Master’s degree in a relevant field + 3 years’ analytics experience; OR
- Option 3: 7 years’ experience in an analytics or related field.
Preferred Qualifications
- Advanced expertise in data science, ML, optimization models; PhD in related fields is valued.
- Experience publishing or peer reviewing in relevant journals/conferences.
- Hands-on experience with open-source ML frameworks (scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch).
- Background in accessibility and inclusive digital experiences (WCAG 2.2 AA knowledge).
- Completion of assessments in Python, Spark, Scala, or R is a plus.
Technology & Tools Mentioned
LangChain, Pydantic AI, RAG patterns, Element LLM Gateway, BERT, SBERT, FAISS, YOLO, RT-DETR, CLIP, XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM, Random Forest, AutoML, PyTorch, ARIMA, Prophet, AWS SageMaker, GCP (Vertex AI, BigQuery, BigQuery ML), Python (Pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn), Docker.
Benefits (summary)
Competitive pay with specified salary ranges by location, performance-based bonuses, potential stock, medical/vision/dental coverage, 401(k), company-paid life insurance, PTO and paid leave options (parental, family care, bereavement, jury duty, voting), short-term and long-term disability, company discounts, military leave pay, adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, and education benefits (Live Better U).