Position Summary...

What you'll do...

About the Role

Walmart’s Next Gen Commerce team is building the future of shopping—powered by intelligent, conversational agents that help customers plan, discover, and purchase in ways that feel effortless and intuitive.

As a Distinguished Data Scientist for Conversational Understanding and Answering, you will play a pivotal IC role in shaping how our AI shopping agents understand and respond across a wide range of customer journeys—from weekly essentials and precision purchases to inspiration-driven browsing and event planning. Your mission is to design scalable, cost-efficient, and high-performing agent experiences that deliver clarity, relevance, and delight in every interaction.

You will prototype, evaluate, and scale agentic workflows that flex across intent types, dialogue structures, and shopping verticals. Your work will involve building reusable flows, integrating with domain-specific tools, services and sub-agents, and ensuring end-to-end conversations are grounded in Walmart’s retail intelligence.

This is a high-impact, hands-on role that blends deep expertise in LLM systems, thoughtful agent design, and architectural vision for real-world conversational AI.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and iterate on modular conversational flows to support a wide range of shopping scenarios, including planning, discovery, reordering, inspiration, goal-driven purchases, and customer care
• Integrate seamlessly with domain-specific tools and sub-agents (e.g., personalization, search, checkout, customer service) to enable rich, context-aware agent behaviors
• Make informed decisions on leveraging out-of-the-box LLMs versus fine-tuned in-house models to optimize for latency, cost efficiency, and performance across shopping domains
• Design and execute fine-tuning strategies for in-house LLMs to enhance understanding, generation, and task-specific performance
• Collaborate with agent-led engagement teams to embed proactive nudges and contextually relevant suggestions into conversational flows
• Partner with evaluation and measurement teams to align agentic workflows with quality signals, leveraging LLM-as-a-judge and human-in-the-loop feedback mechanisms
• Contribute to architectural decisions involving conversation state management, memory systems, and tool chaining for dynamic, multi-step interactions
• Lead system-level experimentation to evaluate agent flow effectiveness, user satisfaction, and business impact

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in data science, machine learning, or NLP, with a focus on conversational agents or task-oriented dialogue systems
• Proven ability to design and implement intelligent, multi-step conversational flows that interface with multiple tools or services
• Strong hands-on experience with large language models, prompt engineering, and conversational design principles
• Familiarity with agentic platforms, memory systems, and real-time decision pipelines
• Ability to translate complex customer journeys into modular, reusable conversational architectures
• Excellent technical collaboration skills and experience partnering across science, product, and engineering teams

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related field
• Experience with multi-agent orchestration, tool-augmented LLMs, or goal-driven planning in conversation
• Prior work in commerce, personalization, or structured search augmentation within chat-based agents
• Knowledge of cost-optimization techniques for real-time inference and LLM response routing
• Track record of shipping production systems or contributing to open-source conversational frameworks

Why Join Us?

This is a rare opportunity to shape the architecture of conversational commerce at the world’s largest retailer. You’ll craft intelligent, adaptive experiences that guide customers across diverse journeys—making shopping not just easier, but more inspiring. Your work will help Walmart’s AI agents go from reactive to truly agentic, combining utility with delight.

About Walmart Global Tech
Imagine working in an environment where one line of code can make life easier for hundreds of millions of people. That’s what we do at Walmart Global Tech. We’re a team of software engineers, data scientists, cybersecurity expert's and service professionals within the world’s leading retailer who make an epic impact and are at the forefront of the next retail disruption. People are why we innovate, and people power our innovations. We are people-led and tech-empowered. We train our team in the skillsets of the future and bring in experts like you to help us grow. We have roles for those chasing their first opportunity as well as those looking for the opportunity that will define their career. Here, you can kickstart a great career in tech, gain new skills and experience for virtually every industry, or leverage your expertise to innovate at scale, impact millions and reimagine the future of retail.
 

Benefits:
Benefits: Beyond our great compensation package, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include 401(k) match, stock purchase plan, paid maternity and parental leave, PTO, multiple health plans, and much more.

Equal Opportunity Employer:
Walmart, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer – By Choice. We believe we are best equipped to help our associates, customers and the communities we serve live better when we really know them. That means understanding, respecting and valuing diversity- unique styles, experiences, identities, ideas and opinions – while being inclusive of all people.

The above information has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed in the role. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all responsibilities and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job. The full Job Description can be made available as part of the hiring process.

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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For information about benefits and eligibility, see One.Walmart.

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Sunnyvale, California US-11656:The annual salary range for this position is $169,000.00-$338,000.00

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Bentonville, Arkansas US-10735:The annual salary range for this position is $130,000.00-$260,000.00

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Additional compensation includes annual or quarterly performance bonuses.

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Additional compensation for certain positions may also include:

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- Stock

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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 6 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 4 years' experience in an analytics related field. Option 3: 8 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, PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Information Technology, Operations Research, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Econometrics, Publications or active peer reviewer in related journals or conference, 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...

1375 Crossman Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1114, United States of America