Staff, Software Engineer

As a Staff Engineer, you'll be a force-multiplying technical leader who sets architectural direction across multiple teams, resolves the hardest ambiguous technical problems, and raises the engineering bar time-wide. You'll operate with significant autonomy — partnering with Directors, Principal Engineers, and Product leadership to deliver on business roadmap, while mentoring Senior Engineers and ensuring technical excellence.

What you'll do:
Own the technical architecture and roadmap for a critical platform domain spanning multiple services and teams
Lead design and implementation of highly available, fault-tolerant, distributed, event-driven systems (Java-based) at Walmart scale
Drive cross-team architecture decisions — making and documenting tradeoffs on availability, consistency, latency, and cost that affect the broader platform
Identify and eliminate systemic reliability, scalability, and performance risks before they become incidents
Set the team-wide bar for operational excellence: telemetry standards, alerting strategy, incident response frameworks, and blameless root-cause-analysis practices
Lead tech-debt reduction and modernization initiatives that span multiple teams and services
Mentor and grow Senior Engineers into technical leaders; raising the quality bar through design reviews, architecture reviews, and engineering best practices
Partner directly with Product, Principal Engineers, and senior stakeholders to translate ambiguous, multi-team business problems into executable technical strategy and milestones

What you'll bring:
10+ years of software engineering experience (or equivalent depth), preferably in Java, with a track record of increasing technical scope and impact
Expert-level experience with microservices, event-driven architecture, and messaging systems (Kafka or similar) at enterprise scale
Deep hands-on experience with SQL and NoSQL datastores, including schema/data-model decisions that affect multiple downstream consumers
Proven ownership of production systems at scale: driving reliability strategy, diagnosing complex cross-service incidents, and leading performance tuning initiatives
Exceptional system design skills, with experience architecting solutions that multiple teams build upon
Demonstrated experience mentoring Senior Engineers and influencing technical direction across teams in fast-paced Agile environments
Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience presenting architecture and design to senior technical and business stakeholders
Demonstrated ability to leverage AI tooling/agents to accelerate development, troubleshooting, and team-wide productivity
You'll stand out if you have:
Deep Azure experience (including Cosmos DB at scale) and Kafka expertise across high-throughput, multi-team systems
A track record of designing and operating enterprise distributed systems with well-reasoned, documented tradeoffs across availability, consistency, latency, and cost
Strong supply chain / fulfillment domain expertise (WMS/WES/FC operations) and the ability to apply it to cross-system architecture decisions