PRINCIPAL, SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Job Description
Position Summary...
What you'll do...
About Team
The Health & Wellness Engineering team at Walmart is on a mission to make healthcare more accessible, affordable, and convenient for millions of customers across the US. We build the technology that powers Walmart's pharmacy, specialty pharmacy, and wellness platforms spanning prescription management, clinical workflows, patient-facing digital experiences, and health program delivery. Our systems process millions of prescriptions annually and connect patients, pharmacists, prescribers, and payers in real time. Our data platforms and pipelines turn that activity into timely, trustworthy insight. The team operates at the intersection of technology and healthcare, building platforms that have a direct, measurable impact on patient outcomes and community health.
What you'll do
As a Principal Engineer for Walmart Health & Wellness, you'll have the opportunity to:
- Set the multi-year technical vision for the Health & Wellness engineering domain across pharmacy, specialty pharmacy, clinical workflows, patient digital experiences, and health program delivery. You'll own the big bets on platform direction, technology selection, and build-vs-buy decisions, backed by clear business and financial rationale.
- Own the data platform strategy. Define the architecture for data ingestion, processing, storage, and serving across H&W, including near-real-time pipelines that deliver prescription, adjudication, and clinical events to downstream consumers with low latency and high reliability.
- Own the most consequential cross-domain architecture decisions. Author and sponsor RFCs and ADRs, chair architecture review forums, and resolve competing technical positions across senior leaders and teams with well-reasoned trade-offs.
- Lead large-scale data migrations from legacy stores and pipelines to modern platforms. Plan cutovers, validate data parity and lineage, and deliver with zero patient impact and no loss of data integrity.
- Establish observability for data and services. Define standards for pipeline health, data freshness, lag, quality, and lineage, alongside distributed tracing, SLIs/SLOs, and alerting, so that issues are detected before they reach patients or business users.
- Translate business goals and regulatory requirements into technical strategy. Partner with senior leadership, product, and compliance to align the roadmap with HIPAA/HITECH obligations, payer and pharmacy requirements, and long-term platform health, and shape annual and quarterly planning.
- Define the engineering standards for the H&W org, covering API design, service communication, data consistency, data governance, observability, security, and resilience. Drive adoption through paved roads, reusable platform capabilities, and governance, not mandates alone.
- Own the reliability and scale strategy for systems handling millions of prescriptions a year, real-time payer adjudication, and clinical data workflows. This includes SLO frameworks, capacity planning, multi-region failover, and disaster recovery, with a focus on zero patient impact. Lead executive-level communication during major incidents and drive systemic fixes afterward.
- Lead enterprise-scale modernization of legacy platforms. Set the migration strategy (strangler-fig, domain decomposition, incremental re-architecture), sequence it across teams, define exit criteria, and measure progress in risk reduction and cost.
- Multiply engineering impact across the org. Mentor staff and principal engineers, grow the next generation of technical leaders, set the bar for technical excellence, and lead hiring, leveling, and promotion calibration for senior IC roles.
- Represent H&W engineering in senior leadership and cross-org forums, including Walmart Global Tech platform teams, data and analytics governance, security, compliance, and enterprise architecture.
- Adhere to Company policies, procedures, mission, values, and standards of ethics and integrity.
What you'll bring
- BE/B.Tech/MS/MCA in Computer Science or a related technical field
- 15+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years operating at staff or principal scope across multiple teams, with deep hands-on expertise in Java backend development, data platforms, and large-scale distributed systems
- Java (Expert Level): Mastery of Core Java (JVM internals, GC tuning, memory model, concurrency), the Spring Boot ecosystem (Spring Security, WebFlux, Spring Cloud), reactive and async programming, and performance profiling (Java Flight Recorder, VisualVM, JProfiler)
- Data Platforms & Pipelines: Hands-on experience designing and operating data platforms and batch and streaming pipelines at scale. Proficiency with event streaming and processing (Kafka, Kafka Streams, Flink, Spark, or similar), workflow orchestration, and cloud data services
- Near-Real-Time Data: Proven experience building low-latency, near-real-time data flows, including change data capture (CDC), event-driven ingestion, stream processing, and serving layers. You understand freshness, ordering, idempotency, and exactly-once or effectively-once trade-offs
- Data Migrations: Experience leading large, high-stakes data migrations, including dual-write and dual-read strategies, backfills, reconciliation, data validation, and phased cutovers with rollback plans
- Data Observability: Experience defining and implementing observability for pipelines and datasets, including freshness, volume, schema, and quality monitoring, lineage, lag tracking, and alerting, alongside service-level observability
- System Design at Scale: Proven ability to design and evolve distributed, fault-tolerant, high-throughput systems (100K+ RPS). Deep expertise in microservices, event-driven architecture, CQRS, the Saga pattern, distributed caching, API mesh, and multi-region deployment
- Architecture Patterns: Domain-Driven Design, hexagonal and clean architecture, strangler-fig modernization, Backend for Frontend (BFF), and service mesh (Istio/Envoy). You know when to apply each pattern and when not to
- Platform & API Engineering: Experience designing platform-level capabilities, shared services, and internal SDKs consumed by many teams. Familiarity with OpenAPI/AsyncAPI governance, GraphQL federation, and gRPC at scale
- Data Architecture: Advanced expertise across relational (PostgreSQL/MySQL at scale, including partitioning, replication, and read replicas) and NoSQL stores (Cassandra, Redis, MongoDB, CosmosDB). Strong grasp of data consistency patterns, eventual consistency trade-offs, schema evolution, and data modeling for analytics and operational use
- Healthcare & Compliance: Deep understanding of HIPAA/HITECH, PHI/ePHI data governance, and audit trail design. Experience with healthcare interoperability standards (HL7 v2, FHIR R4, NCPDP, X12 EDI). You build compliance and data protection into architecture from the start, not as an afterthought
- Cloud & Infrastructure at Scale: Expert-level cloud architecture on GCP, Azure, or AWS. Kubernetes (cluster design, multi-tenancy, resource governance), Terraform/IaC, service mesh, multi-region failover, and cost optimization at platform scale
- Observability & Reliability: Experience defining observability strategy (distributed tracing, structured logging, SLI/SLO/SLA definition, alerting), chaos engineering, capacity planning, and leading post-mortems that produce systemic fixes
- Cross-Team Collaboration: Experience working closely with platform and data teams (such as TDC) to define shared ownership, interfaces, and operating models that let multiple teams move fast without breaking each other
- Strategic Technical Leadership & Influence: A track record of setting multi-year technical direction adopted across multiple organizations. You have authored influential RFCs and ADRs, represented engineering in executive forums, and raised the technical bar across senior IC and management layers
- Business Acumen: Ability to connect architectural choices to cost, regulatory risk, time-to-market, and patient outcomes. Comfortable making sound decisions with incomplete information
- Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication. You can explain complex trade-offs clearly to executives, product leaders, and non-technical stakeholders
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience with pharmacy or PBM systems, e-prescribing (NCPDP SCRIPT), or payer adjudication
- Experience implementing FHIR-based interoperability at scale
- Experience with data governance, cataloging, and lineage tooling
- Experience applying GenAI or ML in regulated clinical or patient-facing workflows, with appropriate governance
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 [Bangalore/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.
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.
