(USA) Senior Director, Product Management

Reference: R-2670229Posted: 2026-10-30Location: BENTONVILLE, AR, United States; SUNNYVALE, CASalary: $160000 - $320000/yearType: Full time / Regular/PermanentCompany: WalmartBusiness Segment: Home OfficeAI is reshaping how Walmart builds technology, serves customers and associates, operates the business, and makes decisions. As AI rapidly evolves across traditional machine learning, generative AI, multimodal models, and agentic systems, we are building an Enterprise AI Platform that provides the common foundation for AI workloads across Walmart. The platform brings together capabilities spanning MLOps, model and inference access, LLM gateway services, developer experience, model lifecycle management, observability, governance, reliability, and AI economics. Its purpose is to help teams across Walmart build and operate AI solutions quickly, safely, reliably, and economically at enterprise scale. As Senior Director of Product Management for the Enterprise AI Platform, you will define the product vision, strategy, and execution for one of the foundational platforms powering Walmart’s AI transformation. This role requires more than traditional product management. You will need to understand where AI technology is heading, determine which capabilities should become durable enterprise platform primitives, and translate rapidly changing technology into a coherent product strategy. You will work closely with senior engineering leaders, architects, AI teams, infrastructure teams, governance and security partners, and business leaders to make decisions spanning models, infrastructure, developer experience, safety, economics, and platform architecture. The ideal leader combines strong product judgment, meaningful technical depth, deep understanding of the AI ecosystem, strategic thinking, storytelling, executive influence, financial discipline, and a bias for action. You will bring clarity to ambiguity, stay grounded in customer and engineering realities, raise the bar continuously, and operate with the ownership of an entrepreneur and the maturity of an enterprise leader. What You’ll Do Define the product vision and strategy: Establish the long-term direction for Walmart’s Enterprise AI Platform and translate Walmart’s AI ambitions into clear product priorities, platform capabilities, and investment decisions. Build for the evolution of AI: Anticipate shifts across foundation models, multimodal AI, agents, inference technologies, orchestration, and AI infrastructure, and ensure the platform evolves ahead of enterprise demand. Create durable platform abstractions: Determine where common capabilities should exist across models, providers, infrastructure, lifecycle management, governance, and developer workflows so teams can move faster while preserving flexibility and optionality. Drive model and infrastructure optionality: Enable teams to use the right models and infrastructure based on capability, quality, performance, cost, availability, and risk while minimizing unnecessary provider or technology lock-in. Create a world-class developer experience: Simplify how engineers, data scientists, and product teams discover AI capabilities, onboard, experiment, evaluate, deploy, observe, and operate AI workloads from development through production. Make cost a first-class product consideration: Build platform capabilities and product mechanisms that help teams understand and optimize model consumption, infrastructure utilization, unit economics, capacity, and cost-performance tradeoffs. Embed safety and governance into the platform: Partner with AI Governance, Security, Privacy, Legal, Compliance, and Risk teams to make enterprise controls, observability, and guardrails scalable and easy for engineering teams to adopt. Make the safe path the easiest path: Create platform defaults and paved roads that improve speed, reliability, security, governance, and cost efficiency at the same time. Own the AI ecosystem strategy: Continuously evaluate commercial models, open models, infrastructure providers, emerging AI technologies, and open-source ecosystems. Determine where Walmart should build, buy, partner, integrate, or standardize. Separate durable trends from hype: Develop informed perspectives on emerging AI technologies and identify which changes materially affect Walmart’s platform strategy and which do not. Understand customers deeply: Build strong relationships with engineering, product, data science, and business teams. Use customer feedback, product telemetry, adoption data, and direct engagement to identify friction and shape the roadmap. Drive adoption through product value: Build a platform teams choose because it makes them faster and more effective. Identify barriers to adoption and systematically remove them. Partner deeply with Engineering: Operate as a strategic counterpart to engineering leadership and engage credibly on architecture, APIs, inference, MLOps, orchestration, reliability, observability, capacity, and developer workflows. Turn ambiguity into direction: Frame complex problems, establish principles, evaluate tradeoffs, make decisions with incomplete information, and move teams from ambiguity to execution. Tell a compelling platform story: Translate complex technical concepts into clear narratives for engineers, product teams, senior executives, and business leaders, connecting platform investments to enterprise strategy and measurable outcomes. Prioritize ruthlessly: Balance foundational investments, customer needs, technology evolution, reliability, technical debt, safety, cost, and strategic bets while keeping the organization focused on the areas of highest enterprise leverage. Measure product outcomes: Establish metrics spanning adoption, onboarding, developer productivity, reliability, performance, utilization, cost efficiency, governance coverage, customer satisfaction, and business impact. Lead across organizational boundaries: Align Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, Governance, Security, Data, Finance, Procurement, and business teams around common priorities and decisions. Build a high-performing product organization: Recruit and develop strong product leaders and create a culture of customer focus, technical curiosity, ownership, intellectual honesty, urgency, and high standards. What You’ll Bring Extensive product leadership experience building and scaling AI/ML platforms, developer platforms, cloud platforms, infrastructure products, or other highly technical enterprise platforms. Demonstrated success defining platform strategy and translating it into roadmaps, technical capabilities, operating mechanisms, adoption, and measurable outcomes. Strong understanding of the modern AI ecosystem, including machine learning, generative AI, foundation models, multimodal systems, AI agents, inference, MLOps, model lifecycle management, evaluation, observability, and AI infrastructure. Sufficient technical depth to engage credibly with senior engineers, architects, distinguished technical leaders, infrastructure teams, and AI experts on complex architectural and product decisions. Strong product judgment and the ability to distinguish between individual feature requests and reusable platform capabilities that create enterprise leverage. Demonstrated ability to understand APIs, platform abstractions, developer workflows, distributed systems, reliability, performance, and cloud infrastructure. Strong understanding of AI economics, including model pricing, token consumption, inference costs, infrastructure utilization, capacity, and cost-performance tradeoffs. Proven ability to operate in rapidly evolving and ambiguous environments, establish first principles, create structure from incomplete information, and drive decisions and execution. Strong strategic and systems thinking, with the ability to connect customer needs, technology evolution, architecture, economics, risk, and enterprise strategy. Exceptional storytelling and executive communication skills, with the ability to simplify sophisticated technical concepts while preserving the substance needed for sound decisions. Strong listening skills, maturity, self-awareness, and intellectual flexibility. Able to form clear points of view, challenge assumptions, and change direction when evidence warrants it. Demonstrated ability to influence senior leaders and highly technical teams across organizational boundaries through credibility, clarity, and results. A strong bias for action and practical problem solving, balanced with the judgment to recognize when foundational decisions require deeper consideration. Strong business and financial acumen, with the ability to connect platform investments and technology decisions to cost, efficiency, adoption, risk, and business value. Experience building and developing strong product teams and senior product leaders. An entrepreneurial mindset combined with enterprise leadership maturity: the ability to move with urgency, challenge existing assumptions, create new possibilities, and build capabilities that operate reliably at global scale. Preferred Qualifications Experience leading product strategy for AI/ML platforms, MLOps platforms, inference or model gateways, GenAI platforms, developer platforms, or large-scale cloud infrastructure. Experience across commercial and open model ecosystems and understanding of the technical and economic implications of model optionality. Experience with model gateways, routing, quotas, capacity management, inference optimization, evaluation, prompt or model lifecycle management, agents, and runtime observability. Experience building platforms that support both traditional ML and generative or agentic AI workloads. Experience with AI governance, Responsible AI, security, privacy, or safety engineering. Experience owning products with significant infrastructure or third-party consumption costs and driving improvements in unit economics. Experience making build-versus-buy decisions and working with cloud providers, model providers, open-source technologies, and emerging AI companies. Experience leading global product teams and influencing highly distributed engineering and business organizations. What Success Looks Like You will establish the Enterprise AI Platform as the preferred foundation for building and operating AI across Walmart. Teams will move from experimentation to production faster. Developers will be able to adopt new models and AI capabilities without repeatedly rebuilding foundational infrastructure. Walmart will maintain flexibility across models, providers, and infrastructure as the ecosystem evolves. The platform will make cost, safety, reliability, governance, and developer experience core product capabilities. Teams will have the visibility and tools needed to make intelligent tradeoffs across quality, performance, economics, and risk. You will build a clear platform strategy that anticipates where AI is going while remaining grounded in the problems customers face today. You will earn the trust of engineering and business leaders through sound judgment, technical credibility, practical action, and consistent execution. The strongest leader in this role will see around corners, bring clarity to ambiguity, translate rapid AI evolution into durable platform strategy, inspire through a compelling narrative, make difficult decisions with confidence, develop other leaders, and build a world-class AI platform that allows Walmart to move faster, operate safely, and use its scale as a competitive advantage. 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 . 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. Bentonville, Arkansas US-10735: The annual salary range for this position is $160,000.00 - $320,000.00 Sunnyvale, California US-11789: The annual salary range for this position is $208,000.00 - $416,000.00 Additional compensation includes annual or quarterly performance bonuses. Additional compensation for certain positions may also include : - StockMinimum qualifications["Option 1: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or related area and 13 years’ experience in product management. Option 2: 15 years’ experience in product management or related area."]Preferred qualifications["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.", "Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business Administration, or related area and 12 years’ experience as a product manager, ideally working on consumer-facing, large-scale, highly complex B2B/C products", "Supervisory experience"]