PRINCIPAL, SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Job Description

Position Summary... What you'll do... About the team You will serve as the technical north star for the Returns engineering organization and beyond. This group values highly resilient, defensive coding practices heavily grounded in modern Java ecosystems. We foster a culture of continuous learning, innovation, and deep technical rigor, where you will have the autonomy to solve massive enterprise architectural problems and make a profound, global impact on Walmart's operations. What You’ll Do Enterprise Architecture & Strategy: Define the technical vision and architect sophisticated, highly scalable, and ultra-high-performing backend systems. Drive cross-domain architectural decisions impacting massive-scale business units like eCommerce, Fulfillment, and Inventory. Technology Leadership: Spearhead the adoption of modern frameworks, advanced microservices architectures, and hybrid cloud strategies to build globally distributed solutions. Resolve the most critical, complex system bottlenecks and performance issues. Strategic Collaboration: Partner intimately with Enterprise Architects, Product Leadership, and VP-level stakeholders to define long-term technical roadmaps, drive strategic innovations, and align engineering execution with business goals. Mentorship & Culture: Act as a technical multiplier across the organization. Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, elevate overall engineering capabilities, and establish a culture of technical excellence, strict governance, and independent execution. Innovation & Influence: Present groundbreaking architectural designs, industry trends, and strategic technical solutions to large organizational groups and executive leadership, acting as an industry thought leader. What You’ll Bring Education & Experience: An Engineering Degree (B.E/BTech/MTech/MS) in Computer Science or related field with 12-15 years of deep, hands-on experience in software engineering and system architecture. Core Java Expertise: Master-level proficiency in modern Java (Java 11/17 ), JVM internals, advanced concurrency, multi-threading, and performance tuning at extreme scale. Distributed Systems: Proven track record of designing, building, and operating massive-scale, globally distributed systems. Deep authoritative knowledge of scalability, fault tolerance, and high-availability patterns. Data & Messaging: Master-level command over Distributed Databases (NoSQL/SQL), asynchronous messaging, and event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka) handling billions of events. Cloud & Microservices: Extensive, hands-on architectural experience with Cloud technologies (Azure/GCP/AWS), advanced microservices patterns, Kubernetes, and container orchestration. Engineering Excellence: Profound understanding of CS Fundamentals, Data Structures, and Algorithms. Ability to define and enforce SDLC best practices, CI/CD strategies, and strict operational guidelines for multiple teams. Communication: Highly influential communication skills with a proven track re

Required Skills