(USA) Principal, Data Scientist

What you will do

• Consult with business stakeholders regarding algorithm‑based recommendations and lead their transformation into business actions.
• Collaborate with the Senior Manager and Director of Data Science to promote data‑science adoption in the domain.
• Guide data scientists at all levels to deliver ML products on schedule.
• Improve efficiencies in data‑science and ML best practices, ML‑Ops, resource utilization, reusability, and multi‑tenancy.
• Lead multiple complex ML products and coach senior technical leads in effective product delivery.
• Foster synergies across products through algorithmic innovation and knowledge sharing.
• Identify complex business problems for advanced ML solutions, uncovering opportunities and gaps.
• Evaluate business cases for projects and initiatives.
• Translate business requirements into strategies, initiatives, and projects aligned with objectives, and drive execution of deliverables.
• Set deliverables based on success criteria and define key metrics to measure progress and effectiveness.
• Quantify business impact and conduct regular impact measurement of all ML products.
• Select and review model evaluation metrics based on analytical requirements.
• Document and maintain testing information for the team.
• Address complex problems critical to Walmart’s business and deliver actionable insights.
• Use a product mindset to build, scale, and deploy holistic data‑science products after successful prototyping.
• Apply incremental solutions with an agile, flexible approach to overcome practical challenges.
• Present recommendations to business partners and influence plans based on insights.
• Collaborate with associates in other regions to deliver high‑quality, customer‑centric analytic solutions.
• Drive innovation in approach, methods, practices, and outcomes across end‑to‑end problem solving.
• Engage with the external community to promote Walmart’s brand and stay current on industry practices.
• Promote and support company policies, procedures, mission, values, and standards of ethics and integrity.

What you will bring

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or related field with 10‑15 years of experience.
• Minimum ten years as a data‑science technical lead, driving projects from conception to production in a fast‑paced environment.
• Strong communication and leadership skills, able to influence and inspire cross‑functional teams.
• Deep experience building data‑science solutions in fraud prevention, forecasting, shrink and waste reduction, inventory management, recommendation, assortment, and price optimization.
• Proven ability to lead multiple data‑science initiatives end‑to‑end, translating business needs into analysis, building solutions, and maintaining deployments.
• Extensive ML experience covering classification, regression, NLP, forecasting, unsupervised models, optimization, graph ML, causal inference, and Gen‑AI.
• Desirable Gen‑AI skills: embedding generation, vector database storage and retrieval, managed LLM provisioning, retrieval‑augmented generation agents, prompt engineering, fine‑tuning, monitoring, and governance.
• Experience scaling and deploying data‑science solutions.
• Strong proficiency in Python or R; experience with GCP, Azure, Hadoop (Hive, MapReduce, HQL, Scala), and GPU/CUDA for computational efficiency.
• Experience with PySpark, Vertex AI, Kubeflow, and model deployment pipelines.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary ($143,000‑$286,000 in Sunnyvale; $132,000‑$264,000 in Hoboken) plus performance‑based bonuses.
• 401(k) match and stock purchase plan.
• Paid parental leave, PTO, and flexible time‑off policies.
• Medical, vision, and dental coverage for you and your family.
• Short‑term and long‑term disability insurance; company‑paid life insurance.
• Living‑and‑learning benefits: paid education stipend for approved programs, tuition reimbursement, and access to internal training.
• Special considerations for military leave, adoption, and surrogacy expense reimbursement.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field with 5 years of analytics experience.
• Masters degree in the same fields with 3 years of analytics experience.
• Alternatively, 7 years of experience in an analytics‑related role.

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced knowledge of machine learning, optimization models, and operations research.
• Ph.D. in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Information Technology, Operations Research, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or Econometrics.
• Active contributor or reviewer in peer‑reviewed journals or conferences.
• Experience with open‑source frameworks (scikit‑learn, TensorFlow, Torch) and proficiency in Python, Spark, Scala, or R.
• Knowledge of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standards and experience building accessible digital experiences.

Primary Location

815 Eleventh Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089, United States.

Salary

Sunnyvale, California: $143,000.00 - $286,000.00 per year. Additional compensation includes annual or quarterly performance bonuses and potential equity awards.

Hoboken, New Jersey: $132,000.00 - $264,000.00 per year. Additional compensation includes annual or quarterly performance bonuses and potential equity awards.