Principal Data Engineer

Principal Data EngineerPrincipal Engineer responsible for architecting scalable data systems processing billions of advertising and customer signals across real-time, near-real-time, micro-batch, and batch workloads. Ensure low latency, high throughput, resilience, replayability, idempotency, and cost-efficient scaling. Unify advertising data across campaigns, identity, audiences, measurement, optimization, CRM, and advertiser lifecycle. Build reusable, configuration-driven, multi-tenant platforms with standardized schemas, contracts, governance, observability, privacy, and deployment patterns. Modernize legacy pipelines for real-time optimization, reporting, activation, and ML. Lead agentic data enablement spanning discovery, pipeline automation, monitoring, diagnostics, cost optimization, onboarding, recommendations, and secure, explainable production guardrails.About the team: Global AdTech and MarTech builds the data and decisioning platforms powering advertising across Walmart U.S., Sam's Club, and international markets.

Connects identity, intent, audiences, campaigns, inventory, bidding, relevance, creative, transactions, attribution, and measurement at massive scale in real time. Enables Sponsored Products, Display, CTV, offsite, social, and in-store advertising, plus reporting, targeting, activation, optimization, forecasting, recommendations, and advertiser analytics. Operates platforms processing billions of events, ad requests, and tens of billions of bids daily. Designs for throughput, latency, correctness, resilience, privacy, scalability, and cost efficiency. Advances AI and agentic advertising through trusted, governed, reusable data foundations and decisioning capabilities.What you'll bring: Deep expertise designing billion-scale, real-time and near-real-time distributed data systems using Spark, Flink, Kafka, streaming, orchestration, and compute/storage optimization. Strong experience with GCP or equivalent cloud platforms, including BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataflow, Pub-Sub, Airflow, and modern data infrastructure.

Deep understanding of low-latency architectures at scale, partitioning, backpressure, replay, consistency, fault tolerance, resilience, recovery, and cost efficiency. Strong AdTech/MarTech expertise across retail media, bidding, targeting, identity, attribution, measurement, reporting, CTV, and privacy-safe collaboration is desirable. Ability to connect real-time architecture decisions to campaign delivery, ROAS, reach, frequency, inventory utilization, and advertiser outcomes. Proven Principal-level leadership shaping architecture, standards, strategic trade-offs, design reviews, and senior technical talent.Minimum Qualifications: Option 1: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and 5 years' experience in software engineering or related field. Option 2: 7 years' experience in software engineering or related field. Option 3: Master's degree in Computer Science and 3 years' experience in software engineering or related field.

4 years' experience in data engineering, database engineering, business intelligence, or business analytics.Preferred Qualifications: Data engineering, database engineering, business intelligence, or business analytics, ETL tools and working with large data sets in the cloud, Master's degree in Computer Science or related field and 5 years' experience in software engineering or related field. 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: 1275 Crossman Ave, Sunnyvale, CA , 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.