Senior Director, Semantic Data & AI Strategy

Walmart; Bentonville (AR); On-site; USD 160,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Walmart seeks a Senior Director of Data Science & Ontology to define and scale semantic intelligence strategies across the company. Lead teams spanning ontology, taxonomy, knowledge graphs, ML, and AI-enabled data products to deliver measurable business impact at enterprise scale.

You will partner with product, engineering, merchandising, and executive stakeholders to drive high-value opportunities, establish governance, and ensure responsible AI practices while building a world-class data

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in data science, machine learning, applied AI, ontology, knowledge graphs, search, recommendations, data platforms, or related technical domains.
• 6+ years of people leadership experience, including leading managers, senior technical talent, or multi-disciplinary data science and AI teams.
• Proven success defining strategy and delivering enterprise-scale data science, AI, semantic data, ontology, taxonomy, or knowledge graph capabilities in production.
• Deep understanding of ontology design, taxonomy governance, semantic modeling, metadata, data quality, entity resolution, and data governance.
• Strong applied AI and machine learning foundation, including experience with NLP, embeddings, classification, ranking, recommendation systems, experimentation, model evaluation, and production model monitoring.
• Experience partnering with product, engineering, business, governance, and executive stakeholders to turn ambiguous business problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate technical strategy, tradeoffs, risks, and business impact to senior executives.
• Track record of building inclusive, high-performing teams and developing future leaders.

Responsibilities

• Lead Enterprise Data Science and Ontology Strategy and translate business priorities into scalable semantic capabilities.
• Build scalable ontology-driven systems connecting structured and unstructured data across domains.
• Own data quality, governance, and responsible AI with auditability and compliance.
• Drive business impact by partnering with leaders to define success metrics and ROI.
• Lead end-to-end data science lifecycle from problem framing to deployment and monitoring.
• Scale teams with talent development and robust operating models.
• Champion innovation in semantic data platforms and responsible AI.

Skills

Data science

Ontology

Knowledge graphs

Semantic search

Machine learning

Leadership

Communication

AI governance

LLM / RAG

MLOps

Education

Advanced degree

Tools

Spark

Python

SQL

Graph databases

SPARQL

Job description

Walmart seeks a Senior Director of Data Science & Ontology to define and scale semantic intelligence strategies across the company. Lead teams spanning ontology, taxonomy, knowledge graphs, ML, and AI-enabled data products to deliver measurable business impact at enterprise scale.

You will partner with product, engineering, merchandising, and executive stakeholders to drive high-value opportunities, establish governance, and ensure responsible AI practices while building a world-class data