Principal Data Scientist: Associate AI experience

Bellevue, WA: $132,000 - $264,000/yrBentonville, AR: $110,000 - $220,000/yr Show more Regular/ PermanentSalariedLoading map...Bellevue, WA: $132,000 - $264,000/yrBentonville, AR: $110,000 - $220,000/yr Show more Regular/ PermanentSalaried Position Summary... What you'll do... We are seeking a Principal Data Scientist to provide technical leadership and long-term vision for next-generation AI systems and platforms.

This senior individual contributor will drive breakthrough system design and advanced solution development that transforms Walmart at scale. The role combines deep technical expertise (ML, simulation, optimization, agentic AI) with cross-functional influence, mentoring of senior talent, and delivery of high-impact, productionized solutions. You will be a great fit if: - You architect end-to-end ML/AI systems - from feature engineering through production deployment and monitoring - You've built and shipped multiple autonomous AI agents (not just experimented with LLM APIs) - You're Level 5+ on Steve Yegge's Vibe Coding scale and can ship production systems through AI-assisted development - You combine deep statistical rigor with practical business impact About the Team The Associate AI Experiences team applies advanced data science, machine learning, and agentic AI to solve high-impact business problems across Walmart globally.

You'll build production Agentic systems, deploy autonomous AI agents, and translate complex data into actionable insights that drive measurable business value at massive scale. Our team builds intelligent platforms, agents and ML-powered solutions that make associates' jobs easier, faster, and more fulfilling across stores, fulfillment centers, distribution centers, and home office. We leverage the Element LLM Gateway to safely access state-of-the-art language models while keeping all data within Walmart's network.

Our work spans NLP, computer vision, time series forecasting, and multi-agent AI systems at enterprise scale. What You'll DoBuild and deploy production ML systems end-to-end: data pipelines, feature stores, model training, serving layers, monitoring, and feedback loops at scaleProvide technical visionand lead advanced development in agentic AI, reinforcement learning, and simulation. Architect and deploy large-scale AI systems and autonomous AI agents - conversational assistants, predictive agents with tool-calling, and multi-agent orchestration systems using LangChain, Pydantic AI, and RAG patternsDesign agentic evaluation frameworks that benchmark agent performance across task completion, code quality, and multi-step reasoning accuracyDeploy NLP pipelines at enterprise scale - semantic similarity across millions of records using BERT/SBERT embeddings and vector search (FAISS)Lead high-impact projects end-to-end; problem framing, modeling, prototyping, production architecture, and rollout.

Author and review technical designs and standards; present findings to senior leadership.Mentor senior scientists and engineers on advanced modeling techniques, feature engineering, and experimentation design - raising the technical bar across teams.Establish best practices for model validations, experiemention, and safe deployment of AI systems. Influence roadmap prioritization and long-term strategy for AI and simulation capabilities.

Present insights to senior leadership with compelling data visualization, quantified business impact, and clear confidence intervals. What You'll BringDeep expertise in ML algorithms (XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM, Random Forest, AutoML) and deep learning (PyTorch, transformer architectures).Production experience with NLP (BERT, SBERT, FAISS, RAG), computer vision (YOLO, CLIP), and time series forecasting (ARIMA, Prophet).Hands-on experience building and orchestrating multiple AI agents with LangChain, RAG, tool integration, and memory management.Multi-cloud ML platform proficiency - AWS SageMaker AND GCP (Vertex AI, BigQuery, BigQuery ML).Strong Python skills (Panda