SENIOR MANAGER, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Position Summary...Walmart's Corporate Tech & Services (CTS), Finance Tech pillar, is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead multiple engineering squads building scalable, intelligent FinTech platforms. This is a senior leadership role that combines deep technical credibility with strong people and delivery management — owning end-to-end roadmap execution, hiring and growing engineering talent, and driving cross-functional alignment with product, data science, and senior stakeholders.
The ideal candidate brings 12+ years of software engineering experience — with a solid full-stack background spanning Java, Spring Boot, Scala, React, Kafka, and distributed data systems — along with 3+ years of hands-on engineering management experience. They are expected to engage meaningfully in architecture decisions, uphold a high engineering bar across the team, and guide the responsible adoption of GenAI capabilities in production — setting clear standards around governance, output quality, and AI safety. Strong communication skills to represent engineering outcomes, risks, and investments to executive leadership are essential.
Beyond delivery and technical leadership, this role is fundamentally about people. The right candidate builds inclusive, high-performing teams, invests seriously in engineer growth and career development, and creates an environment where engineers do the best work of their careers. This is not a role for someone who manages from a distance — we expect presence, engagement, and the ability to think both in the details and several moves ahead on strategy, org design, and capability building.

What you'll do...

About the Team

You will lead an Engineering team that builds and operates scalable, intelligent data platforms enabling analytics, automation, and AI-driven decision-making across the organization in the FinTech space. Our work focuses on designing high-performance data systems, ensuring reliability and operational excellence, and integrating Generative AI capabilities to enhance how data is processed, understood, and used.

We work at the intersection of full-stack software engineering and applied AI — developing production-grade systems that handle data at scale, automate complex workflows, and drive measurable business impact. As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will shape both the technical direction and the culture of the team, ensuring we ship with quality, operate with discipline, and grow engineers who are proud of what they build.

Walmart's Corporate Tech & Services (CTS) is a powerhouse of several exceptional teams delivering world-class technology solutions and services making a profound impact at every level of Walmart. As a key part of Walmart Global Tech, our teams set the bar for operational excellence and leverage emerging technology to support millions of customers, associates, and stakeholders worldwide.

What You Will Do :

Engineering Leadership & Delivery

• Own End-to-End Delivery: Drive the planning, prioritization, and execution of engineering roadmaps across multiple squads — balancing feature delivery, technical debt, reliability, and innovation with clear business alignment.
• Set and Uphold Engineering Standards: Define and enforce the team's bar for code quality, system design, observability, and operational readiness — ensuring these standards are consistently applied across full-stack, data, streaming, and AI workloads.
• Remove Barriers at Scale: Proactively identify and eliminate blockers impacting team velocity — whether organizational, technical, or process-related — and develop contingency plans to keep delivery on track.
• Lead Architectural Decisions: Partner with Principal and Staff Engineers to guide design decisions across backend services (Java, Spring Boot), front-end (React), data pipelines (Scala, Spark), event streaming (Kafka), and AI-augmented systems.
• Drive Operational Excellence: Champion observability-first engineering — structured logging, distributed tracing, SLO/SLA definition, and reliability frameworks — ensuring the team owns production, not just code.

People Development & Team Building

• Hire and Grow Top Engineering Talent: Lead hiring for Staff, Senior, and Mid-level engineers — identifying talent, running structured interviews, and making quality hiring decisions that raise the team's overall capability.
• Mentor and Coach Engineers: Invest in the growth of your engineers through regular 1:1s, structured performance conversations, clear development plans, and hands-on technical guidance.
• Build a High-Performance, Inclusive Culture: Foster a team environment grounded in psychological safety, belonging, and high standards — where engineers feel empowered to take ownership, raise concerns, and do their best work.
• Develop Future Leaders: Identify and grow senior individual contributors and leads within the team, creating a strong internal pipeline of engineering ownership and technical leadership.
• Recognize and Reward Impact: Acknowledge strong contributions consistently and deliberately — reinforcing the behaviours and outcomes the team values most.

Strategy & Stakeholder Management

• Translate Business Goals into Engineering Plans: Partner with product, data science, and business leadership to translate strategic priorities into clearly scoped, technically sound engineering roadmaps with measurable outcomes.
• Communicate Across Levels: Represent the team's work, risks, and outcomes clearly to senior stakeholders — from sprint-level delivery updates to executive-level investment and impact narratives, including AI adoption and ROI.
• Drive Cross-Functional Alignment: Build strong working relationships with peer engineering managers, principal engineers, product managers, and operations teams to ensure smooth cross-team dependencies and delivery.
• Evaluate and Evolve Ways of Working: Continuously assess the effectiveness of team processes, rituals, and tooling — soliciting feedback, identifying inefficiencies, and driving improvements that improve quality, speed, and developer experience.

AI Strategy & Adoption

• Embed AI into Team Workflows: Lead the team's adoption of GenAI capabilities — from AI-assisted development and code review to integrating LLM-powered features into production systems — with a focus on measurable productivity and quality gains.
• Set Responsible AI Standards: Define and own the team's standards for responsible AI engineering — prompt governance, output auditing, model versioning, and bias awareness — ensuring AI components are production-safe and auditable.
• Stay Ahead of the Curve: Evaluate emerging AI frameworks, LLM APIs, and agentic patterns — guiding the team on when and how to adopt them with engineering rigour rather than hype.

Compliance & Integrity

• Uphold Walmart's Values and Policies: Champion and model Walmart's standards of ethics, integrity, and compliance — ensuring the team operates consistently within company policies and open-door principles.
• Engage with the Broader Engineering Community: Participate in and contribute to Walmart Global Tech's engineering community through forums, design reviews, mentorship programs, and knowledge-sharing initiatives.

What you will bring

• 12+ years of overall Software Engineering experience, including 3+ years in an Engineering Manager role leading multiple squads or a mid-to-large engineering team.
• Strong technical foundation across the full stack — hands-on background spanning backend services (Java, Spring Boot, Scala), front-end (React), data pipelines (Spark), and event streaming (Kafka); credible enough to engage deeply in system design and architectural trade-offs.
• Proven experience leading distributed, event-driven system design — including Kafka-based streaming architectures, CQRS, pub/sub patterns, and real-time data processing at scale.
• Demonstrated people leadership — track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineering talent across seniority levels, with a coaching-first management style.
• Strong delivery management skills — ability to plan, prioritize, and drive multi-team roadmaps with clear milestones, risk management, and stakeholder communication.
• Cloud platform proficiency — working knowledge of GCP (BigQuery, Cloud Run, GCS) or equivalent, with experience guiding teams on cloud infrastructure optimization and cost governance.
• CI/CD and DevOps culture — experience embedding strong engineering practices (Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, observability) across an engineering organization, not just a single team.
• Observability and operational mindset — experience defining SLOs, driving incident reviews, and building a culture of production ownership and continuous reliability improvement.
• Working knowledge of AI/GenAI — sufficient depth to evaluate, guide, and govern the integration of LLM-based capabilities into production systems; ability to distinguish engineering value from hype.
• Excellent communication and influence skills — ability to align diverse stakeholders, present technical strategy to senior leadership, and drive decisions with clarity and confidence.

Good to Have

• Experience in FinTech, payments, or regulated domains where compliance, audit trails, and production reliability are non-negotiable engineering requirements.
• Hands-on experience with agentic AI systems (LangChain, LangGraph) or LLM API integration in production — not required, but a meaningful differentiator.
• Familiarity with data governance and responsible AI frameworks — especially in high-stakes environments with regulatory oversight.
• SQL and data modelling depth — experience guiding teams working across relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and columnar (BigQuery, Redshift) data systems.
• Contributions to engineering communities — internal or external — through talks, mentorship programs, open-source contributions, or thought leadership.
• Experience managing distributed or globally dispersed engineering teams.

Leadership Philosophy

• The ideal candidate leads with technical credibility and human empathy in equal measure. They set a high engineering bar, hold the team to it consistently, and invest deeply in the growth of the people around them. They build clarity out of ambiguity, translate strategy into executable plans, and create an environment where great engineers want to stay and do the best work of their careers.
• This is not a role for someone who manages from a distance. We expect our Senior Engineering Managers to be present, engaged, and deeply connected to the technical realities their teams face — while also thinking two or three moves ahead on strategy, org design, and capability building.

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.

Walmart’s culture sets us apart, and we know being together helps us innovate, learn and grow great careers. This role is based in our Chennai office for daily work, with the flexibility for associates to manage their 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.

Belonging

We aim to create a culture where every associate feels valued for who they are, rooted in respect for the individual. Our goal is to foster a sense of belonging, to create opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers, and to be a Walmart for everyone.

At Walmart, our vision is "everyone included." By fostering a workplace culture where everyone is—and feels—included, everyone wins. Our associates and customers reflect the makeup of all 19 countries where we operate. By making Walmart a welcoming place where all people feel like they belong, we’re able to engage associates, strengthen our business, improve our ability to serve customers, and support the communities where we operate.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Walmart, Inc., is an Equal Opportunities 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 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.

Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 5 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.
Option 2: 7 years’ experience in software engineering or related area. 2 years’ supervisory experience.

Preferred Qualifications...

Outlined below are the optional preferred qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no preferred qualifications.

Master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 3 years' experience in software engineering or related area., 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...Tower 1, Part Of 1st, 2nd To 4th Flrs, Intl Tech Park Radial Road (radial It Park Pvt Ltd), , India