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Walmart

Software Engineer III - Conversational AI

Walmart, Sunnyvale

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Position Summary...

What you'll do...

What you'll do...

Cortex Team is Walmart's core A.I. conversational platform, powering the vision of delivering the worlds best personal assistants to Walmarts customers, accessible via natural voice commands, text messages, rich UI interactions, and a mix of all of the above via multi-modal experiences.

We believe conversations are a natural and powerful user interface for interacting with technology and enable a richer customer experiences both online and in-store. We are building and designing the next generation of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) services that other teams can easily integrate and leverage, and build rich experiences: from pure voice and text shopping assistants (Siri, Sparky), to customer care channels, to mobile apps with rich, intertwined, multi-modal interaction modes ( ).

Interested in diving in?

We need solid engineers with the talent and expertise required to

design, build, improve and evolve our capabilities in at least some of

the following areas:

  • Service oriented architecture in charge of exposing our NLU

capabilities at scale, and enabling increasingly sophisticated model

orchestration.

  • Since the service takes in traffic for a large set of Walmart

customers (that is 80% of American households!), you will get to

solve non trivial challenges in terms of service scalability and

availability.

  • You will design and build the primitives to efficiently orchestrate

model-serving microservices, taking into account their dependencies,

and improving the /combined/ latency and robustness of such

microservices (e.g. fan out in parallel to N services for a single

request, and reply with whichever gives the fastest answer).

  • You will also bake-in functionality which can drive improved machine

learning modeling and experimental design, such as A/B testing.

  • Model serving and operations

  • There is a constant tension between model improvements (more

computations) and model serving latency. So, we are always in a

quest of crunching more numbers, while preserving our SLAs, and

controlling the operational costs.

  • You will guide our efforts to always find the best tradeoffs in

terms of architecture, tooling (Tensorflow serving / ONNYX /

Triton) and infrastructure (CPU / GPU, GCP/Azure) for model

serving -- based on the latest model developments and product

requirements.

  • In particular, you will drive principled and scientific load-testing

efforts, to clearly identify the tradeoffs at hands, and

tune/optimize the model-serving stack.

  • Tooling, infrastructure and pipelines for reproducible workflow and

models, enabling rapid innovation across the entire product lifecycle.

  • You will author and maintain pipelines that safely build and deploy

models to production via continuous deployment.

  • You will achieve scalable and efficient resource management

capabilities (cloud infrastructure).

  • You will provide robust and built-in diagnostics for quality control

throughout.

  • You will integrate -- or build -- labeling tools which can

seamlessly integrate at the heart of our conversation data store

(GCP, BigQuery) and intertwine multiple labeling sources of various

confidence levels.

Come at the right time, and you will have an enormous opportunity to

make a massive impact on the design, architecture, and implementation of

an innovative, mission critical product, used every day, by people you

know, and which customers love.

As part of the emerging tech group, you will also have the additional

opportunity of building demos, proof of concepts, creating white papers,

writing blogs, etc.

Minimum Qualifications

  • Solid data skills, sound computer-science fundamentals, and strong

programming experience.

  • Deep hands-on technical expertise in full-stack development.

  • Programming experience with at least one modern language with an

efficient runtime, such as Scala, Java, C++, or C#.

  • Experience with at least one relational database technology such as

MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MS SQL.

  • Some level of fluency in Python (lingua-franca of our

data-scientists).

  • Understanding of the challenge of distributed data-processing at

scale.

  • Deal well with ambiguous/undefined problems; ability to think

abstractly.

  • Ability to take a project from scoping requirements through actual

launch.

  • A continuous drive to explore, improve, enhance, automate, and

optimize systems and tools.

  • Capacity to apply scientific analysis and mathematical modeling

techniques to predict, measure and evaluate the consequences of

designs and the ongoing success of our platform.

  • Excellent oral and written communication skills.

  • Bachelor’s degree or certification in Computer Science, Engineering,

Mathematics, or any other related field.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Large scale distributed systems experience, including scalability and

fault tolerance.

  • Experience taking a leading role in building complex data-driven

software systems successfully delivered to customers

  • Relentless focus on scalability, latency, performance robustness, and

cost trade-offs -- especially those present in highly virtualized,

elastic, cloud-based environments.

  • Exposure to cloud infrastructure, such as Open Stack, Azure, GCP, or

AWS as well as infrastructure management tech (Docker, Kubernetes)

  • Experience building/operating highly available systems of data

extraction, ingestion, and massively parallel processing for large

data sets. In particular experience in building large scale data

pipelines using big data technologies (e.g. Spark / Kafka / Cassandra

/ Hadoop / Hive / BigQuery / Presto / Airflow).

  • Hands-on expertise in many disparate technologies, typically ranging

from front-end user interfaces through to back-end systems and all

points in between.

  • Familiarity with Machine Learning concepts & processes

  • Masters or PhD in Computer Science, Physics, Engineering, Math, or

equivalent.

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 .

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 $117,000.00-$234,000.00

Additional compensation includes annual or quarterly performance bonuses.

Additional compensation for certain positions may also include:

  • Stock

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 2 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.Option 2: 4 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.

Customer Service, 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.

Masters: Computer Science

Primary Location...

680 West California Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94086-4834, United States of America

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, abilities, ideas and opinions- while being inclusive of all people.

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