Staff Data Scientist - Ranking & Personalization with GenAI

Walmart; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Walmart is seeking a Staff Data Scientist to drive innovation across BuyBox, Search & Personalization. You will develop ML solutions spanning ranking, recommendation systems, GenAI, and neural networks, leading projects from research to deployment at Walmart scale.

You will identify data sources, ensure data quality, and build scalable models that influence millions of products, offers, and customer interactions, delivering measurable impact.

Qualifications

• Expertise in ML, ranking, recommender systems, information retrieval and personalization.
• Proficiency in Python and data processing tools.
• Strong knowledge of Learning-to-Rank, neural networks, embeddings, and modern recommendation techniques.
• Experience applying Generative AI and LLMs to real-world ML problems.
• Experience building and deploying data pipelines and large-scale production ML systems.
• Strong experimentation, A/B testing, statistics, and model evaluation.
• Ability to lead complex, ambiguous initiatives and influence technical direction.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead advanced ML solutions for BuyBox offer ranking, Variant Leader Selection, Search, and Personalization.
• Build and advance ranking and recommendation systems using Learning-to-Rank, deep learning, and modern ML techniques.
• Apply GenAI, LLMs to improve ranking, semantic understanding, personalization, and customer experience.
• Drive research and innovation, translating new ideas into scalable production solutions.
• Lead projects from problem definition and modeling through offline evaluation, A/B testing, production deployment, and impact measurement.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Analytics, and business stakeholders on strategy and technical roadmaps.
• Provide technical leadership, establish ML best practices, and mentor Data Scientists.
• Deploy and monitor models in production environments, ensuring performance and scalability.

Skills

Machine learning

Ranking

Recommendation systems

Information retrieval

Personalization

Python

Learning-to-Rank

Neural networks

Embeddings

Representation learning

GenAI & LLMs

Experimentation

A/B testing

Statistical methods

Model evaluation

MLOps / production ML

Leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Mentoring Data Scientists

Tools

BigQuery

PySpark

Hive

SQL

Job description

Walmart is seeking a Staff Data Scientist to drive innovation across BuyBox, Search & Personalization. You will develop ML solutions spanning ranking, recommendation systems, GenAI, and neural networks, leading projects from research to deployment at Walmart scale.

You will identify data sources, ensure data quality, and build scalable models that influence millions of products, offers, and customer interactions, delivering measurable impact.