Principal Data Scientist

About The Role

The Merchandising Data Science team builds advanced systems that power critical merchandising decisions such as product selection, space management, inventory planning, price setting, and distribution logistics. As a Principal Data Scientist, you will independently own and deliver solutions for complex, well-defined problems — examples include improving price elasticity estimation, enhancing forecast accuracy for seasonal products, or optimizing distribution center outbound planning to ensure executable flows.

Your role involves transforming ambiguous business queries into precise mathematical formulations and deploying fully productionized systems that provide automated decisions or actionable recommendations to merchants and planners. You will work as an individual contributor, influencing teammates through high standards and domain expertise without direct reports.

Key Responsibilities

• Take complete ownership of a challenging merchandising problem from initial question to a scalable production system.
• Define success metrics, decision variables, constraints, and realistic fallback options for your solutions.
• Determine whether to build fully automated decision engines or human-augmenting decision support systems, tailoring your approach accordingly.
• Implement solution methods such as mathematical optimization, heuristics, simulations, forecasting, causal inference, or hybrid techniques backed by data-driven evidence.
• Integrate your solution with merchandising, planning, and platform infrastructure to ensure production readiness.
• Develop and propagate best practices, reusable components, and quality standards to uplift others working on the problem.
• Design experiments and define metric frameworks to demonstrate measurable improvements like accuracy, margin uplift, or recommendation adoption.
• Create comprehensive documentation and frameworks that ensure ongoing advancement without sole dependency on your involvement.
• Anticipate subsequent problem iterations proactively to continue enhancing merchandising decisions.
• Utilize AI-assisted development tools to accelerate iteration while maintaining correctness and maintainability.
• Clearly articulate problem context, trade-offs, and recommendations to diverse stakeholders including engineering leads and business users.

Qualifications & Experience

• Proven history of delivering impactful, specific business solutions through automated or decision-support systems.
• Strong expertise in optimization and decision sciences, including mathematical programming, constraint programming, heuristics, or simulation, complemented by applied machine learning, forecasting, or causal inference skills.
• Experience addressing challenges such as demand and elasticity modeling, long-term and seasonal forecasting, constrained execution planning, assortment and allocation optimization, or price response modeling within merchandising, retail, or supply chain domains.
• Ability to design solutions serving both fully automated machine decisions and human decision-makers requiring interpretable recommendations and evidence.
• Effective at mentoring, reviewing, and standardizing practices to elevate team output beyond personal contribution.
• Sound judgment balancing optimality and robustness, automation and human augmentation, with clear rationale for trade-offs.
• Committed to iterative improvement and accountability through solution adoption and validation stages.
• Individual contributor leadership mindset without direct people management responsibilities.
• Educational requirements: Either a bachelor's degree plus 5 years of analytics-related experience, a master's degree plus 3 years, or 7 years of relevant experience.

About Walmart Global Tech

Walmart Global Tech is a hub for innovation within the world's leading retailer, focused on building technology that impacts millions of lives globally. Our teams comprise experts in software engineering, data science, cybersecurity, and other specialties driving the future of retail. We foster a people-driven and tech-empowered culture encouraging continuous learning and career growth.

This role is based in our Bangalore office with workplace flexibility to support personal balance.

Benefits & Culture

• Competitive compensation paired with performance-based incentive awards.
• Comprehensive benefits package including maternity/parental leave, paid time off, and health coverage.
• An inclusive culture that values diversity and belonging, striving to make Walmart welcoming for all associates and customers across the global footprint.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Walmart is committed to being an Equal Opportunity Employer, embracing diversity in identities, experiences, and perspectives. We value and respect individual uniqueness while fostering an inclusive work environment.