Director, Software Engineering

About the Team

The Containers and Runtime Platforms team within Global Tech Platforms manages Walmart's enterprise Kubernetes platform, which supports tens of thousands of services operating across various clouds and regions. This platform tackles complex challenges in scale, reliability, security, and efficiency to enable Walmart engineers to deliver software rapidly and safely.

The platform combines startup-like agility with enterprise-grade accountability, supporting workloads from e-commerce, supply chain, stores, data to AI/ML including GPU-accelerated training and inference. It continuously evolves to enhance automation, self-service, and AI-driven operations.

Role Responsibilities

• Lead the operations charter of the Kubernetes platform, integrating best practices, and resolving critical enterprise challenges across multiple markets and business units.
• Own the overall strategy, roadmap, and delivery of the enterprise Kubernetes platform, managing teams and managers spread across diverse geographies.
• Ensure platform reliability, availability, and operational excellence through SLO-based operations, reducing incidents, containing blast radius, and enhancing resilience in multi-region and hybrid/multi-cloud setups.
• Oversee development and support of container platform services catering to both long-running online workloads and batch processing, including AI/ML with GPU acceleration.
• Set platform best practices involving cluster architecture, multi-tenancy, scheduling, networking, service mesh, and lifecycle automation.
• Develop frameworks to prioritize platform use cases and investments based on business value and developer impact.
• Collaborate with application engineers, SREs, product managers, security teams, and infrastructure partners for platform adoption and value realization.
• Advocate iterative solutions with agility to manage large-scale practical challenges.
• Optimize capacity, utilization, and cost-efficiency through improved scheduling, bin-packing, and resource governance.
• Build and mentor a high-performing engineering team, including hiring and nurturing managers and senior individual contributors.
• Drive continuous platform improvement by researching and integrating industry and open-source best practices.
• Execute multiple business plans aligned to projects and deliverables.
• Leverage internal and external partnerships to fulfill business objectives, engaging stakeholders in planning and execution.
• Implement security, compliance, and policy-as-code frameworks ensuring enterprise governance and regulatory compliance.
• Engage with global leadership to set team priorities and foster collaboration across geographies to deliver exceptional services worldwide.

Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor of Engineering or an equivalent degree in a closely related field.
• 15+ years of experience in creating and managing large-scale infrastructure, distributed systems, or platform solutions.
• Significant experience overseeing platform and engineering operations for mission-critical user applications.
• Comprehensive knowledge of Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem, including cluster architecture, control plane and etcd operations, scheduling, autoscaling, networking (CNI, ingress, service mesh), storage (CSI), and observability.
• Leadership experience managing large or medium distributed platform teams with supervisors across multiple locations.
• Proficiency in operating across public and private clouds such as Azure, GCP, and on-premises/OpenStack, with expertise in multi-region and disaster recovery designs.
• Hands-on experience developing self-service developer platforms and CI/CD ecosystems with a focus on developer productivity and platform adoption.
• Strong track record in maintaining operational excellence, including ownership of availability, performance, security, cost, SLOs, incident and problem management, and continuous improvement.
• Excellent communication and influence skills with a history of collaborating with senior leadership and fostering a culture of innovation and engineering excellence.

Company Culture and Benefits

Walmart Global Tech is a technology group within the world’s leading retailer focused on creating impactful software solutions that benefit millions globally. The company encourages innovation, continuous learning, and career growth, offering roles for both early-career individuals and seasoned experts.

This role is based at the Bangalore office with flexible arrangements to support work-life balance. Benefits include competitive compensation, performance incentives, maternity and parental leave, paid time off, health benefits, and comprehensive inclusion and diversity initiatives to ensure every associate feels valued and included.

Equal Opportunity and Inclusion

Walmart, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer dedicated to diversity and inclusion, respecting unique styles, experiences, and perspectives. The company strives to create a welcoming environment for all employees, customers, and suppliers.

Minimum Requirements

• Option 1: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or a related field plus 6 years of relevant software engineering experience.
• Option 2: Minimum of 8 years' experience in software engineering or related area.
• At least 3 years of supervisory experience.

Location

The position is located at Building 10 (SEZ), Cessna Business Park, Kadubeesanahalli Village, Varthur Hobli, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.