PRINCIPAL, DATA SCIENTIST

Position Summary...Drives the execution of multiple business plans and projects by identifying customer and operational needs; developing and communicating business plans and priorities; removing barriers and obstacles that impact performance; providing resources; identifying performance standards; measuring progress and adjusting performance accordingly; developing contingency plans; and demonstrating adaptability and supporting continuous learning. Provides supervision and development opportunities for associates by selecting and training; mentoring; assigning duties; building a team-based work environment; establishing performance expectations and conducting regular performance evaluations; providing recognition and rewards; coaching for success and improvement; and ensuring diversity awareness. Promotes and supports company policies, procedures, mission, values, and standards of ethics and integrity by training and providing direction to others in their use and application; ensuring compliance with them; and utilizing and supporting the Open Door Policy. Ensures business needs are being met by evaluating the ongoing effectiveness of current plans, programs, and initiatives; consulting with business partners, managers, co-workers, or other key stakeholders; soliciting, evaluating, and applying suggestions for improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness; and participating in and supporting community outreach events.

What you'll do...

Our Team

The Data Science team at Walmart Global Tech is focused on using the latest research in machine learning, statistics and optimization to solve business problems in assortment, catalog content, pricing, sourcing, customer, supply chain, and replenishment areas for multiple countries within Walmart’s global operations. We mine data, distill insights, extract information, build analytical models, deploy Machine Learning algorithms, and use the latest algorithms and technology to empower business decision-making. We work with engineers to build reference architectures and machine learning pipelines in a big data ecosystem to productize our solutions. Advanced analytical algorithms driven by our team will help Walmart to optimize business operations, business practices and change the way our customers shop.

The data science community at Walmart Global Tech is active in most of the Hack events, utilizing the petabytes of data at our disposal, to build some of the coolest ideas. All the work we do at Walmart Labs will eventually benefit our operations & our associates, helping Customers Save Money to Live Better. 

Your Opportunity

As a Principal Data Scientist, in the Catalog-data sciences team, you'll have the opportunity to -

• Drive innovative strategic solutions of improving catalog content utilizing advanced SOTA AI and ML solutions at large scale and at accelerated pace.

• Drive data-derived insights across a wide range of retail divisions by developing advanced statistical models, machine learning algorithms and computational algorithms based on business initiatives

• Work closely with Directors, Sr. Managers of Data Science, and leaders of Architecture, Engineering, Product & business teams to drive the Organizational strategy around AI driven Catalog and Content management.

• Direct the gathering of data, assess data validity and synthesize data into large analytics datasets to support project goals

• Lead a team of Data Scientists, Data Analysts, Data Engineers to improve the Catalog Content Quality using advanced Machine Learning and Gen AI.

• Utilize big data analytics and advanced data science techniques to identify trends, patterns, and discrepancies in data. Determine additional data needed to support insights

• Build and train AI/ML models for replication for future projects

• Deploy and maintain the data science solutions

• Communicate recommendations to business partners and influence future plans based on insights

Your Responsibility

• Consult with product and business stakeholders regarding algorithm-based recommendations and be a thought-leader to develop these into business actions.

• Guides data scientists, senior data scientists and staff data scientists across the domain DS team to ensure on-time delivery of ML products.

• Proactive collaboration with cross-functional teams on driving the end-to-end content improvement.

• Research oriented development to find innovative solutions on content improvement, with a strong grasp of multi-lingual and multi-modal foundational models.

• Lead multiple complex ML products and guide senior tech leads in the domain in efficiently leading their products.

• Proactive identification of complex business problems that can be solved using advanced ML and Computer Vision, finding opportunities and gaps in the current business domain

• Evaluates proposed business cases for projects and initiatives

• Translates business requirements into strategies, initiatives, and projects and aligns them to business strategy and objectives, and drives the execution of deliverables

• Sets relevant deliverables based on the established success criteria and define key metrics to measure progress and effectiveness of the solution

• Quantifies business impact and ensures regular impact measurement of all ML products in the domain.

• Identifies and reviews model evaluation metrics based on analytical requirements

• Ensures testing information is documented and maintained by the team

• Guide teams to perform model deployment following MLOps guidelines.

• Play a key role to solve complex problems, pivotal to Walmart's business and drive actionable insights

• Utilize product mindset to build, scale and deploy holistic data science products after successful prototyping

• Demonstrate incremental solution approach with agile and flexible ability to overcome practical problems

• Articulate and present recommendations to business partners and influence plans based on insights

• Partner and engage with associates in other regions for delivering the best services to customers around the globe

• Work with the customer-centric mindset to deliver high-quality business-driven analytic solutions.

• Drive innovation in approach, method, practices, process, outcome, delivery, or any component of end-to-end problem solving

• Proactively engages in the external community to build Walmart's brand and learn more about industry practices

• Promote and support company policies, procedures, mission, values, and standards of ethics and integrity

Our Ideal Candidate

You are a technically strong and high-performing individual with excellent communication skills, a proven analytical skillset, and customer focus. Have proven experience in leading data science initiatives in areas like Catalog content improvement, attribute and image enhancements, item classifications and grouping, matching, content scoring and cleaning. You stay updated with the latest research and technology ideas and have a passion for utilizing innovative ways to solve problems. You stay updated with the latest research and technology ideas and have a passion for utilizing innovative ways to solve problems. You are a good storyteller and able to articulate the intricacies of your models and explain your results clearly to stakeholders. In addition, you have industry knowledge of the retail space, with a keen interest in keeping up to date on the latest happenings in this space.

Your Qualifications

• Bachelor's with > 15 years, Masters > 12 years OR Ph.D. in Comp Science/Statistics/Mathematics with > 10 years of relevant experience. Educational qualifications should be Computer Science/Statistics/Mathematics or a related area.

• Experience of acting as a tech lead for > 7 years.

• Ability to lead data science projects end to end.

• Deep experience in building data science solutions with a focus on catalog content such as attribute and image enhancements, item classifications and grouping, matching, content scoring and cleaning at the scale of billions of items across many countries.

• Strong experience in machine learning, supervised and unsupervised: NLP, Classification, Data/Text Mining, Multi-modal supervised and unsupervised models, Neural Networks, Deep Learning Algorithms, Generative AI models.

• Experience in analyzing complex problems and translating them into analytical solutions.

• Deep experience in analyzing complex problems and translating them into analytical solutions.

• Strong experience in Computer Vision, image processing, object detection, Deep learning. Exposure to image features, edge detection, blur, sharpness, corner detection, face detection, knowledge of how image data is represented.

• Knowledge of Deep learning, CNNs, and components of CNNs, loss functions for classification, object detection, segmentation.

• Experience in machine learning: Classification models, regression models, NLP, Forecasting, Unsupervised models, Optimization, Recommendation models, deep-learning, Graph ML, Causal inference, Causal ML, Statistical Learning, experimentation

• Ability to utilize data science solutions outcomes to drive predictive and prescriptive analytics.

• Experience with big data analytics - identifying trends, patterns, and outliers in large volumes of data

• Ability to scale and deploy data science solutions.

• Experience in LLMs, VLMs, embedding generation from multimodal data, storage and retrieval from Vector Databases, set-up and provisioning of managed LLM gateways, development of Retrieval augmented generation based LLM agents, model selection, iterative prompt engineering and finetuning based on accuracy and user-feedback, monitoring and governance.

• Strong Experience in Python, PySpark, OpenCV, Python, C++, Keras, tensorflow, pytorch, big data platforms like Hadoop

• Google Cloud platform, Vertex AI, Kubeflow, model deployment, Kafka streaming, API development & deployment, CI/CD, MLOPs

Additional Preferred Qualifications:

• Domain Knowledge of Catalog and Content Management.

• Published papers or given talks in leading academic and research journals

• Published papers or given talks in Data Science Forums

• Holds data science related patents

• Knowledge and experience of working on Spanish language.

• Experience with GPU/CUDA for computational efficiency

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.

Flexible, hybrid work

We use a hybrid way of working with primary in office presence coupled with an optimal mix of virtual presence. We use our campuses to collaborate and be together in person, as business needs require and for development and networking opportunities. This approach helps us make quicker decisions, remove location barriers across our global team, be more flexible in our personal lives. Benefits Beyond our great compensation package, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include a host of best-in-class benefits maternity and parental leave, PTO, health benefits, 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

Minimum Qualifications...

Outlined below are the required minimum qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no minimum qualifications.

Minimum Qualifications:Option 1: Bachelors degree in Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Technology or related field and 5 years' experience in an analytics related field. Option 2: Masters degree in Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Technology or related field and 3 years' experience in an analytics related field. Option 3: 7 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.

Primary Location...Pardhanani Wilshire Ii, Cessna Business Park, Kadubeesanahalli Village, Varthur Hobli , India