(USA) Senior, Data Scientist

Walmart Connect; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 117,000 - 234,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock

Education benefits (Live Better U)

Performance bonuses

Job summary

Walmart Connect is seeking a Senior Data Scientist as part of Retail AI Foundations to develop, evaluate, and deploy advanced AI models powering customer and business experiences at Walmart.

You will work with ML engineers, product managers, data teams, and business partners to define success metrics, build models, and improve their production performance while focusing on responsible AI practices.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on expertise in Python and ML technologies
• Ability to translate business problems into model designs and metrics
• Experience with post-training, fine-tuning, and evaluation for production models
• Experience with LLMs, vision, multimodal models, and agent-based systems
• Experience with production deployment and scalable model serving

Responsibilities

• Build, evaluate, and improve ML and Generative AI models (LLMs, image/video)
• Design data and evaluation strategies including curation and offline evaluation
• Run model experiments, benchmarking, and A/B tests for quality and reliability
• Apply fine-tuning, retrieval, prompting to boost production performance
• Collaborate with product/engineering/data teams to translate opportunities into requirements
• Support deployment and monitoring of models in large-scale production
• Mentor junior scientists and promote responsible AI practices

Skills

Python

Machine learning

Deep learning

NLP

Information retrieval

Computer vision

Multimodal AI

Model evaluation

Education

Master’s or PhD in CS/EE/ML/Eng/Robotics/OR/Stats/Math

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Job description

Position Summary

Retail AI Foundations is part of the Retail Intelligence group within Walmart’s AI & Data organization. The team develops and deploys Generative AI and machine learning platforms, models, and services across Walmart’s highest-impact growth pillars—including AI Shopping, Social Commerce, Walmart Connect advertising, creator experiences, marketing, and rich-media content.

Role Summary

As a Senior Data Scientist within Retail AI Foundations, you will develop, evaluate, and deploy advanced AI models and algorithms that power Walmart’s next-generation customer and business experiences. You will apply applied-science rigor to turn complex customer and business problems into scalable, measurable AI solutions.

This role combines hands‑on model development with cross‑functional influence. You will work directly with ML Engineers, product managers, data teams, and business partners to define success measures, build and validate models, and improve their performance in production.

What you’ll do

• Build, evaluate, and improve ML and Generative AI models across LLMs, image and video generation, multimodal understanding, and agentic systems.
• Develop data and evaluation strategies, including dataset curation, exploratory analysis, feature engineering, error analysis, ground truth, and offline evaluation.
• Design and execute model experiments, benchmarking, and A/B tests to measure quality, safety, reliability, latency, scalability, and business impact.
• Apply post‑training, fine‑tuning, retrieval, prompting, and other optimization techniques to improve model performance for production use cases.
• Partner with product, engineering, data, and business teams to translate customer and business opportunities into technical requirements, success metrics, and deployable solutions.
• Work with ML Engineers to deploy, monitor, and iterate on models in large‑scale production environments.
• Communicate technical recommendations and model results to stakeholders, while mentoring junior scientists and engineers on rigorous experimentation and responsible AI practices.

What you’ll bring

• Strong hands‑on expertise in Python, machine learning, deep learning, NLP, information retrieval, computer vision, multimodal AI, and model evaluation.
• Ability to translate customer and business needs into model designs, experiments, technical requirements, and scalable production solutions; communicate findings and tradeoffs clearly across product, engineering, data, business, and leadership teams.
• Experience adapting open‑weight models for specific business use cases through model selection, post‑training, fine‑tuning, and evaluation, including LLM-, vision-, multimodal-, and agent‑based systems.
• Experience benchmarking models and participating in A/B tests; optimizing training and inference architectures across quality, cost, latency, throughput, scalability, and reliability through techniques such as prompt optimization, custom loss functions, reasoning models, and test‑time scaling.
• Experience creating high‑quality retail training and evaluation data, including dataset sourcing and curation, unsupervised or weakly supervised learning, synthetic‑data approaches, and ground‑truth development with crowdsourcing and annotation partners.
• Experience with distributed training and inference, large‑scale model serving, and massively parallel GPU systems; ability to use AI coding assistants effectively and build production agentic AI applications that orchestrate models, tools, and workflows.

Preferred Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business applications.
• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, Engineering, Robotics, Operations Research, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field; or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with LLM post‑training and alignment, including supervised fine‑tuning, reinforcement learning, RLHF, DPO, or related techniques.
• Experience with image or video generation models, multimodal understanding models, or production computer‑vision systems.
• Experience building, evaluating, and operating LLM‑ or agent‑based systems at production scale.

Benefits and Compensation

At Walmart, we offer competitive pay as well as performance‑based bonus awards and other great benefits for a happier mind, body, and wallet. Health benefits include medical, vision and dental coverage. Financial benefits include 401(k), stock purchase and company‑paid life insurance. Paid time off benefits include PTO (including sick leave), parental leave, family care leave, bereavement, jury duty, and voting. Other benefits include short‑term and long‑term disability, company discounts, Military Leave Pay, adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, and more.

You will also receive PTO and/or PPTO that can be used for vacation, sick leave, holidays, or other purposes. The amount you receive depends on your job classification and length of employment. It will meet or exceed the requirements of paid sick leave laws, where applicable.

For information about PTO, see https://one.walmart.com/notices.

Live Better U is a Walmart‑paid education benefit program for full‑time and part‑time associates in Walmart and Sam's Club facilities. Programs range from high school completion to bachelor's degrees, including English Language Learning and short‑form certificates. Tuition, books, and fees are completely paid for by Walmart.

Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits and may depend on your job classification and length of employment. Benefits are subject to change and may be subject to a specific plan or program terms.

For Information About Benefits And Eligibility, See One.Walmart.

The annual salary range for this position is $117,000.00 - $234,000.00

Additional Compensation Includes Annual Or Quarterly Performance Bonuses.

• Stock

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 Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field and 3 years' experience in an analytics related field.

Option 2- Master's degree in Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field and 1 years' experience in an analytics related field.

Option 3 - 5 years' experience in an analytics or related field.

Preferred Qualifications

Outlined below are the optional preferred qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no preferred qualifications.

Data science, machine learning, optimization models, Master's degree in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Information Technology, Operations Research, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Econometrics, Successful completion of one or more assessments in Python, Spark, Scala, or R, Using open source frameworks (for example, scikit learn, tensorflow, torch), 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

815 Eleventh Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-4731, United States of America

Walmart and its subsidiaries are committed to maintaining a drug-free workplace and has a no tolerance policy regarding the use of illegal drugs and alcohol on the job. This policy applies to all employees and aims to create a safe and productive work environment.