Principal, Software Engineer

Position Summary...

What you'll do...We are looking for a highly experienced, hands-on Principal Software Engineer to architect and build large-scale, cloud-native distributed systems powering Walmart’s global fulfillment operations. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, high-throughput APIs, and SQL/NoSQL databases. The ideal candidate has a proven track record of designing, building, and scaling mission-critical backend platforms that handle complex, asynchronous workflows with high availability, reliability, and low latency. As a Principal Engineer, you will drive technical architecture across multiple engineering teams, solve complex distributed systems challenges, and remain actively involved in design, code reviews, performance optimization, and production troubleshooting.
About the Team
Walmart’s Global Integrated Fulfillment (GIF) platform powers critical eCommerce fulfillment operations across Walmart stores, including order processing, picking, staging, storage, packing, and dispense. Our engineering teams build and operate a complex ecosystem of interconnected microservices, real-time APIs, and event-driven workflows that orchestrate fulfillment across multiple systems. Our technology stack includes Java, Spring Boot, Apache Kafka, Microsoft Azure, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, REST APIs, and Kubernetes. We operate highly available, business-critical systems where performance, scalability, data consistency, and operational reliability directly impact store associates and millions of Walmart customers. This is an opportunity to solve challenging distributed systems problems at Walmart scale while influencing the architecture and technical direction of a major fulfillment platform.
What You’ll Do

• Architect large-scale distributed systems: Design and evolve highly available, fault-tolerant microservices and backend platforms supporting complex, high-volume fulfillment workflows.
• Build event-driven architectures: Design reliable asynchronous processing systems using Kafka or equivalent messaging technologies, addressing event ordering, delivery guarantees, idempotency, retries, duplicate processing, and failure recovery.
• Drive database architecture: Design and optimize data models and access patterns across relational and NoSQL databases, addressing partitioning, indexing, concurrency, consistency, and performance at scale.
• Solve complex distributed systems challenges: Address distributed transactions, eventual consistency, race conditions, concurrency, service dependencies, and resilience across interconnected services.
• Engineer for scale and performance: Optimize high-throughput, low-latency APIs and asynchronous workloads through performance profiling, capacity planning, load testing, and bottleneck analysis.
• Own production reliability: Drive observability, distributed tracing, SLOs, P95/P99 latency improvements, incident root-cause analysis, and architectural improvements that prevent recurring production issues.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership: Lead architecture and design reviews, evaluate technical trade-offs, review critical code, and guide implementation across multiple engineering teams.
• Drive architectural modernization: Identify opportunities to simplify distributed workflows, reduce technical debt, improve service boundaries, and build reusable platform capabilities.
• Influence across teams: Partner with engineering leaders, architects, product teams, and dependent platforms to drive technical alignment and deliver scalable, maintainable solutions.

What You’ll Bring

• At least 7+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and building large-scale backend systems in production.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Java and Spring Boot, including multithreading, concurrency, REST APIs, and microservices development.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems architecture, including fault tolerance, eventual consistency, distributed transactions, concurrency control, and failure recovery.
• Production experience with Apache Kafka, including consumer groups, partitioning, offset management, retries, dead-letter queues, idempotency, and message processing guarantees.
• Strong experience with both relational and NoSQL databases, including schema/data modeling, indexing, query optimization, partitioning, and consistency trade-offs. Experience with Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, or similar technologies is relevant.
• Experience building and operating cloud-native applications on Azure, AWS, or GCP, including containerized microservices and Kubernetes-based deployments.
• Proven experience designing high-throughput, low-latency systems, with practical expertise in performance profiling, caching, horizontal scaling, and capacity planning.
• Strong production engineering experience, including observability, distributed tracing, debugging complex cross-service failures, and improving system reliability.
• Demonstrated technical leadership across multiple teams, with the ability to drive architecture decisions while remaining hands-on with engineering implementation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Microsoft Azure, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, and Apache Kafka.
• Experience building large-scale eCommerce, order management, fulfillment, logistics, inventory, or transaction-processing platforms.
• Experience designing systems involving complex workflow orchestration, asynchronous state transitions, and cross-service consistency.
• Experience optimizing systems for high transaction volumes, peak traffic events, and strict latency/reliability requirements.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems into scalable, event-driven microservices architectures.
• Experience establishing engineering standards and mentoring senior engineers across teams.
• You are an engineer who enjoys solving difficult backend and distributed systems problems at scale.
• You have personally designed and built systems that process large volumes of transactions or events, understand how distributed systems fail in production, and know how to engineer for reliability and recovery.
• You are equally comfortable discussing architecture with senior engineering leaders, reviewing complex Java code, diagnosing Kafka consumer lag, investigating database contention, or troubleshooting P99 latency across multiple services.
• Most importantly, you are a hands-on technical leader who can turn complex architectural challenges into practical, scalable engineering solution

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. 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. For information about PTO, see https://one.walmart.com/notices. 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.
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.
For information about benefits and eligibility, see One.Walmart.
The annual salary range for this position is $110,000.00 - $220,000.00 Additional compensation includes annual or quarterly performance bonuses. Additional compensation for certain positions may also include :
- 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 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.

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...

2501 Se J St, Ste A, Bentonville, AR 72716-3724, United States of AmericaWalmart 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.