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.
Our team is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Principal Software Engineer, Backend. In this individual contributor role, you will serve as a technical subject matter expert and mentor, leading the design and development of highly performant, scalable backend systems that power user-facing web and conversational experiences. You bring deep hands-on expertise in Java and Backend Technologies, with a strong passion for system design, reliability, and customer impact. You will play a pivotal role in shaping the technical direction of our products and platforms by architecting complex software systems, driving high-quality code standards, and ensuring alignment with business goals, security, and scalability requirements. The role also involves providing hands-on technical leadership and mentorship to engineers, collaborating closely with cross-functional partners, and establishing and enforcing engineering best practices through thoughtful design and code reviews.
What you'll do:
This is a vital role with significant growth prospects. You will have work to do from day one and you will be counted on to create opportunities that align with the overall organization goals. Some of this role’s key responsibilities are but not limited to:
Own the architecture and technical direction of large-scale, distributed backend systems that support AI-driven, high-traffic web and conversational applications
Design and build scalable backend platforms and APIs using Java, Node.js (TypeScript), and Python that integrate with GenAI and ML services in a secure, reliable, and cost-efficient manner
Design, build, and operate real-time conversational and search platforms, including chatbot and virtual assistant systems, integrating rule-based logic, ML/GenAI services, and scalable backend orchestration in production environments
Define system boundaries, service contracts, and data flows across microservices, event-driven systems, and data-intensive workflows
Partner closely with machine learning engineers, applied researchers, and data scientists to productionize AI/GenAI capabilities, ensuring strong integration patterns, observability, governance, and operational excellence
Lead complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from early design and trade-off analysis through implementation, rollout, and long-term evolution
Set and enforce backend engineering standards for code quality, performance, security, resiliency, and operational readiness through design reviews and code reviews
Drive reliability, scalability, and performance improvements by introducing best practices in caching, concurrency, fault tolerance, rate limiting, and capacity planning
Establish strong observability practices, including logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting, to ensure production systems are debuggable and resilient at scale
Mentor and influence senior and junior engineers by providing technical guidance, architectural coaching, and thoughtful feedback, raising the overall technical bar of the organization
Collaborate with product, design, and business stakeholders to translate complex business problems into robust backend solutions aligned with long-term platform strategy
Support production operations, including participating in on-call rotations, driving incident retrospectives, and implementing systemic fixes to prevent recurrence
Continuously evaluate emerging backend and AI platform technologies and apply them pragmatically to improve developer productivity and system capabilities
What you’ll bring:
13+ years of professional software engineering experience, with the majority spent designing and building large-scale backend and platform systems in production environments
Expert-level backend development experience in one or more of the following:
Java/Spring Boot, Node.js/TypeScript, or Python, with the ability to quickly ramp up across stacks as needed
Proven experience architecting distributed systems, including microservices, event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, and data-intensive workflows
Demonstrated experience building and scaling real-time conversational, chatbot, search, or decision-support systems in production, including low-latency request handling, context management, session state, and high-throughput traffic patterns
Strong understanding of real-time system constraints, such as latency budgets, streaming or asynchronous workflows, rate limiting, graceful degradation, and reliability under bursty or unpredictable workloads
Strong API design expertise, including REST and/or gRPC, service contracts, backward compatibility, versioning, and integration patterns
Hands-on experience integrating AI/ML and GenAI services into backend systems, with an understanding of model serving patterns, latency considerations, prompt orchestration, fallbacks, and cost controls (without requiring model training expertise)
Deep understanding of scalability, performance, and reliability engineering, including caching strategies, concurrency control, rate limiting, fault tolerance, and capacity planning
Experience with data storage and retrieval systems, such as relational and NoSQL databases, search engines, and object storage, and the trade-offs between them
Strong grounding in security and privacy fundamentals, including authentication, authorization, data protection, and secure API design in enterprise environments
Experience building production-grade observability, including structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, alerting, and incident diagnostics
Track record of technical leadership and influence, including leading design reviews, mentoring engineers, establishing coding standards, and guiding teams through complex technical decisions
Operational excellence mindset, with experience supporting production systems, participating in on-call rotations, conducting post-incident reviews, and driving long-term corrective actions
Ability to collaborate effectively across disciplines, working closely with product managers, designers, ML engineers, and business stakeholders to align technical solutions with business goals
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
A strong sense of ownership, craftsmanship, and accountability, paired with a bias toward automation, continuous improvement, and engineering best practices
A passion for learning and staying current with backend, platform, and AI ecosystem trends, and selectively applying new technologies where they create real business value
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...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...Pardhanani Wilshire Ii, Cessna Business Park, Kadubeesanahalli Village, Varthur Hobli , India