(USA) Senior Manager, Data Science

About the role

Position Summary

What you'll do

Retail AI Foundations is part of the Retail Intelligence group within Walmart’s AI & Data organization. The team develops and deploys Generative AI and machine learning platforms, models, and services across Walmart’s highest-impact growth pillars—including AI Shopping, Social Commerce, Walmart Connect advertising, creator experiences, marketing, and rich-media content. Our Applied Science and ML Engineering teams build AI capabilities across Large Language Models (LLMs), image and video generation, and multimodal understanding. We partner with talented scientists, engineers, product managers, and business leaders to improve experiences for customers, associates, advertisers, and creators, while delivering measurable business outcomes. We are committed to exceeding industry standards through cutting-edge research, strong engineering execution, and responsible AI practices.

Role Summary

The Senior Manager, Data Science will lead an Applied Science and ML Engineering team within Retail AI Foundations. This leader will set the scientific and technical direction for production AI systems, working backward from customer needs and business priorities to define the problems, success measures, and investments that matter most.

What You’ll Do

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of Applied Scientists and ML Engineers.
• Define the technical roadmap and science investment strategy for LLMs, image and video generation, multimodal understanding, agentic simulation, and multi-agent systems.
• Translate priority business opportunities and customer-experience needs into AI product strategy, technical priorities, and measurable outcomes.
• Lead the end-to-end development of ML and GenAI capabilities, including data strategy, experimentation, model development, evaluation, deployment, and iteration.
• Partner across product, engineering, data, and business teams to deliver solutions for AI Shopping, Social Commerce, Walmart Connect, creator experiences, marketing, and rich-media content.
• Establish standards for model quality, safety, reliability, latency, scalability, and responsible AI.
• Guide architecture and model decisions spanning proprietary and open-weight models, post-training, fine-tuning, retrieval, and agentic workflows.
• Communicate strategy, technical tradeoffs, model performance, and business impact to senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders.

What You’ll Bring

• Strong expertise in machine learning, deep learning, NLP, information retrieval, analytics, and model evaluation.
• Experience delivering complex ML systems, particularly across Generative AI, computer vision, multimodal AI, or deep learning.
• Ability to turn customer and business needs into clear technical requirements, model designs, and scalable production solutions.
• Strong cross-functional communication skills, including the ability to align product, engineering, technical teams, and leadership.
• Experience with distributed training and inference frameworks, large-scale model serving, and massively parallel GPU systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• 2+ years of people-management experience leading Applied Scientists, Data Scientists, or ML Engineers, and 7+ years of experience building machine learning models or algorithms for business applications.
• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, Engineering, Robotics, Operations Research, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field; or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with LLM post-training and alignment, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, RLHF, DPO, or related techniques.
• Experience with image or video generation models, multimodal understanding models, or production computer-vision systems.

Minimum Qualifications

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

Data science, machine learning, optimization models, PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Information Technology, Operations Research, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Econometrics, Successful completion of one or more assessments in Python, Spark, Scala, or R, Supervisory experience, Using open source frameworks (for example, scikit learn, tensorflow, torch), 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.

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