Distinguished Software Engineer

Walmart Global Tech India; Chennai District; On-site; INR 4,500,000 - 9,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Maternity and parental leave

PTO

Health benefits

Flexible work options

Job summary

Walmart Global Tech India is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to drive end-to-end technical design across complex initiatives, including APIs, UI interfaces, data models, and distributed systems. You will define reference architectures and guardrails to standardize platform work at scale.

This role emphasizes writing production-grade code, leading technical investigations, and shaping AI-enabled engineering practices. Based in Chennai with opportunities to influence global platforms.

Qualifications

• Proven track record in leading large-scale software architecture.
• Ability to unblock teams during production incidents and crises.
• Strong experience with AI/ML-enabled engineering practices.
• Excellent communication with engineering leadership and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end technical design for initiatives spanning API contracts, UI, data models, and distributed systems.
• Define and document reference architectures, design patterns, and guardrails.
• Evaluate technologies and cloud-native patterns at Walmart's scale.
• Author RFCs and ADRs that become the platform’s technical canon.
• Write production-grade code and deploy to production environments.
• Own the full software development life cycle including observability and incident handling.

Skills

Technical leadership

Architectural design

Code reviews

Incident response

Cross-functional collaboration

Strategic thinking

Tools

GitHub Copilot

LLM tooling

Job description

Walmart's Marketplace is the backbone of a thriving ecosystem connecting millions of third-party sellers to hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. You will be build applications that provide accurate and contextual intelligence and recommendations to sellers on Walmart Marketplace and Omni platforms.

What You'll Own:

The Seller growth team is essential to the Marketplace ecosystem, responsible for designing and scaling the global platform that supports the Seller business growth. The team develops robust recommendations & experiences to improve listing quality, timely actions to get maximum exposure for their listings, help them progress in their ratings and reviews on web, mobile, API channels.

• Lead end-to-end technical design for complex initiatives involving from API contracts, UI interfaces and data models to distributed system topologies and cross-cutting concerns.
• Drive platform standardization by defining and documenting reference architectures, design patterns, and implementation guardrails that teams adopt
• Evaluate and select technologies, frameworks, and cloud-native patterns with a clear-eyed understanding of trade-offs at Walmart's operational scale
• Author and review RFCs and architecture decision records (ADRs) that become the technical canon for the platform
• Write production-grade code and not prototypes or proof-of-concepts, test and deploy them to production
• Solve complex problems considering performance, reliability and scalability
• Prototype new solutions rapidly using Al-augmented development workflows and then drive them to production quality
• Conduct deep-dive code reviews that raise the technical bar of the team.
• Own the full software development lifecycle for your initiatives involving design, development, testing, deployment, observability

Complex Problem Solving

• Solve the hardest and complex problems and enable the team while doing so
• Lead technical investigations for P0/P1 incidents affecting platform services; own the root cause analysis and define permanent fixes
• Challenge technical assumptions early in the design process before they become expensive production mistakes
• Navigate ambiguity with confidence by breaking down underspecified problems into structured technical approaches and drive alignment across stakeholders

Platform Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Design for resilience from first principles. Define and own the platform's non-functional requirements
• Instrument systems to be deeply observable and use the signals to drive continuous improvement
• Build runbooks and operational playbooks that enable the broader team to operate the services confidently

This role is Al-forward by design and needs someone who actively shapes how it is used and pushes the frontier of what Al-augmented engineering looks like at scale.

Day-to-Day Al Fluency

• Proficient with GitHub Copilot, Wibey, and LLM-based tooling as active, daily parts of your development workflow
• Use Al to compress every phase of the engineering loop: schema design validation, code generation and review, test coverage acceleration, documentation, drafting, incident root-cause analysis, and API design feedback
• Identify where Al can replace toil, then build the automation yourself

Al-Native Platform Thinking

• Architect and build Al-native capabilities like intelligent API health monitoring, Al-assisted seller onboarding flows, smart alerting and anomaly detection
• Evaluate and integrate Al/ML capabilities into services where they create measurable seller value
• Stay current on the fast-moving AI tooling landscape and bring high-signal, opinionated recommendations to the team

Al Advocacy & Enablement

• Model Al-augmented engineering practices for the team through live demos, pairing sessions, and written guides
• Work with engineering leadership to identify and prioritize investments where Al creates the most leverage across teams
• Contribute to the broader Walmart engineering community's understanding of how to build and operate Al-augmented systems responsibly

What you'll bring:

Distinguished Engineers at Walmart lead through technical gravity. Your impact multiplies across teams.

• Raise the floor - your code reviews, design feedback, and written standards lift the quality of every engineer in the team
• When a team is stuck on a systems design challenge or a production crisis, you are the person who helps unblock
• Your architectural decisions today shape the technical capabilities and codebase for the future
• Grow technical depth across the org through tech talks, design reviews, RFCs, and hands-on pairing, you are a force multiplier for technical growth across Growth Tech
• Bridge platform and product translate complex technical constraints into clear trade-offs that inform product decisions; translate product ambitions into technically sound, phased engineering strategies
• Pioneer Al adoption - model what Al-augmented engineering looks like at the Distinguished level and create the patterns, playbooks, and tooling that the broader team follows

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 Chennai office for daily work, with the flexibility for associates to manage their personal lives.

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.