Distinguished, Software Engineer

Position Summary... What you'll do... As the Distinguished Architect for Transactions, Cart & Checkout at Walmart Global Tech, you will play a pivotal role in defining the technical vision and architecture for some of the most critical experiences in the customer purchase journey. You will provide technical leadership across Cart, Checkout, Payments, Tender orchestration, and related transaction capabilities, shaping how customers seamlessly move from purchase intent through order placement at Walmart scale. As a senior technical leader, you will partner closely with Engineering, Product, Business, Customer Experience, Payments, Fulfillment, and Platform teams to establish the long-term architecture and technology strategy for the Transactions ecosystem. You will drive simplification and modernization of complex transaction platforms, establish scalable architectural patterns, and solve systemic engineering challenges spanning multiple domains and systems. You will champion engineering excellence, platform resilience, performance, availability, extensibility, and technical innovation while influencing senior engineers and architects across the organization. Your leadership will enable teams to deliver faster while strengthening the scalability, reliability, and long-term evolution of Walmart's transaction platforms. About Team The Transactions, Cart & Checkout Engineering team builds and operates the technology powering some of the most critical moments in the Walmart shopping journey, from building and managing a cart through checkout, payment selection, tender processing, and successful order placement. The team is responsible for evolving these transaction experiences while building highly available and scalable platforms capable of supporting Walmart's scale and diverse customer journeys. The organization operates across multiple interconnected domains and platforms, requiring strong architectural foundations, well-defined interfaces, resilient transaction flows, and seamless integration across customer experience, pricing, promotions, inventory, payments, fulfillment, and order-management ecosystems. What you'll do: · Define and drive the North Star architecture and multi-year technology strategy for Transactions, Cart, Checkout, Payments, Tender orchestration, and related capabilities. · Provide end-to-end architectural leadership for the customer transaction journey, ensuring seamless progression from Cart through Checkout, payment, and order placement. · Modernize complex transaction platforms and architectures to improve scalability, resiliency, performance, extensibility, engineering velocity, and speed of business innovation. · Establish clear domain boundaries, architectural patterns, platform contracts, APIs, and integration strategies that simplify interactions across Cart, Checkout, Payments, Order Management, Fulfillment, Pricing, Promotions, Inventory, and other dependent ecosystems. · Architect highly available and fault-tolerant systems that maintain transaction continuity during failures, traffic spikes, dependency degradation, and peak shopping events. · Drive architectural strategies for performance and latency optimization across critical Cart and Checkout customer journeys. · Establish a strong platform architecture strategy that creates reusable transaction capabilities, reduces duplication, simplifies engineering development, and accelerates delivery of new customer and business experiences. · Define scalable architectural patterns supporting evolving customer journeys, channels, markets, fulfillment methods, payment methods, and commerce models. · Lead the architectural evolution of payment and tender orchestration capabilities, enabling flexible and reliable transaction experiences while protecting transaction integrity. · Identify systemic technical constraints and architectural bottlenecks across the Transactions ecosystem and lead engineering strategies to eliminate them. · Champion the application of AI, automation, code intelligence, and modern engineering practices to improve developer productivity, accelerate modernization, strengthen engineering quality, and reduce time-to-market. · Establish technical standards and architecture principles for APIs, distributed systems, events, data contracts, caching, observability, fault isolation, security, performance, scalability, and resilience. · Partner closely with engineering and product leadership to translate strategic business priorities into sustainable architectural capabilities and multi-year technology investments. · Influence architectural decisions across organizational boundaries where Transactions platforms intersect with customer experience, Payments, Fulfillment, Order Management, Pricing, Promotions, Inventory, and enterprise platforms. · Use customer, business, architecture, and engineering metrics to identify systemic opportunities, prioritize technical investments, and measure architecture effectiveness. · Drive operational architecture improvements that proactively address platform health, failure modes, dependency risks, observability gaps, incident patterns, and recovery capabilities. · Lead technology assessments and architecture reviews for significant platform investments and ensure solutions align with long-term engineering principles rather than creating unnecessary complexity or technical debt. · Serve as a technical thought leader across the broader engineering organization, influencing technology direction and raising engineering standards beyond the immediate Transactions domain. · Mentor Principal Engineers, architects, and senior technical leaders, strengthening architectural thinking, technical decision-making, and engineering excellence across teams. · Create strong technical alignment across geographically distributed engineering organizations by establishing shared architecture principles, platforms, patterns, and engineering standards. What you'll bring: · Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a closely related technical discipline. · 13+ years of progressive software engineering and architecture experience, including significant technical leadership across large-scale, business-critical platforms. · Deep experience architecting and operating highly scalable distributed systems supporting high-volume digital customer experiences and transaction workloads. · Demonstrated experience defining enterprise-scale architecture strategies, North Star architectures, and multi-year platform modernization roadmaps. · Deep expertise across modern distributed architectures, microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, cloud platforms, caching, distributed data systems, messaging, observability, and highly available application architectures. · Strong understanding of distributed transaction patterns, consistency, idempotency, failure recovery, fault isolation, resiliency, and high-availability architecture. · Experience architecting high-performance customer-facing platforms where latency, availability, scalability, reliability, and customer experience are critical. · Strong understanding of modern commerce and transaction journeys, including Cart, Checkout, payments, tendering, pricing, promotions, inventory, fulfillment, ordering, and the broader purchase lifecycle. · Proven experience simplifying and modernizing large, complex technology ecosystems while maintaining business continuity. · Strong track record of solving systemic technical challenges spanning multiple teams, platforms, and organizational boundaries. · Demonstrated ability to establish architecture principles and technical standards that improve consistency while enabling engineering teams to innovate independently. · Strong experience driving operational excellence through architecture, including platform resilience, observability, performance optimization, capacity planning, fault isolation, disaster recovery, and engineering quality. · Experience leveraging AI, automation, developer platforms, and modern software engineering practices to improve engineering productivity and accelerate delivery. · Ability to connect architecture and technology investments with measurable customer and business outcomes including conversion, revenue, customer experience, reliability, and engineering efficiency. · Proven ability to influence senior Engineering, Product, Business, and Platform leaders and drive alignment around complex architectural decisions. · Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship of Principal Engineers, architects, and other senior engineering talent. · Exceptional communication and influencing skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical problems and articulate architectural strategies to both technical and executive audiences. Business & Engineering Outcomes In this role, you will drive measurable architectural and engineering outcomes across Transactions, Cart & Checkout, including: - Establish and drive adoption of a North Star architecture for Cart, Checkout, Payments, and transaction platforms, creating clear domain boundaries and a scalable foundation for the long-term evolution of the purchase journey. - Reduce architectural complexity and systemic technical debt by simplifying service interactions, eliminating unnecessary dependencies, rationalizing overlapping capabilities, and establishing well-defined platform contracts. - Increase architecture reuse and leverage through standardized APIs, event patterns, data contracts, reusable transaction capabilities, and common platform patterns that enable teams to build and integrate capabilities faster. - Improve resilience by design across critical transaction flows through fault isolation, graceful degradation, idempotency, recovery patterns, dependency management, and architectures designed to withstand partial failures. - Architect platforms to consistently support 99.99%+ availability, peak-scale transaction volumes, and predictable performance across critical Cart and Checkout paths. - Improve end-to-end transaction performance and latency by identifying architectural bottlenecks and optimizing critical paths across Cart, Checkout, Payments, and dependent systems. - Reduce the blast radius of failures by evolving tightly coupled transaction flows toward architectures with stronger isolation, clearly defined boundaries, and independently scalable components. - Accelerate modernization by defining migration architectures and incremental transformation patterns that allow legacy capabilities to be safely replaced without disrupting critical customer journeys. - Improve engineering velocity through architecture, enabling teams to independently develop, test, deploy, and scale capabilities while reducing cross-team coordination and dependency overhead. - Create an extensible Transactions architecture that enables new payment methods, fulfillment choices, markets, channels, and customer experiences to be introduced without significant redesign of core transaction platforms. - Establish measurable architecture health and governance mechanisms that identify technical debt, architectural drift, scalability constraints, resilience gaps, and modernization opportunities before they become systemic risks. - Strengthen technical consistency across the Transactions ecosystem by driving adoption of architecture principles and engineering standards spanning APIs, events, data, caching, observability, security, resilience, and performance. - Leverage AI, automation, code intelligence, and architecture intelligence to accelerate modernization, improve understanding of complex dependencies, strengthen engineering quality, and enable better technical decision-making. - Improve the quality and speed of critical architectural decisions by establishing clear decision frameworks, reference architectures, technology standards, and documented architectural trade-offs across teams. - Create technical leverage beyond individual teams by developing reusable patterns, reference implementations, and platform capabilities that can be adopted broadly across the Transactions engineering organization. - Raise the technical leadership bar by mentoring Principal Engineers and senior technical leaders, driving architecture communities and reviews, and building stronger distributed ownership of architecture across the organization. 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 is a competitive advantage, and it’s fostered by being together. Working together in person allows us to collaborate, align quickly and innovate with greater speed. We use our campuses to create purposeful connection rooted in deepening understanding and investing in the development of our associates. Our hubs: Walmart is a global company with offices across the United States and around the world. Our global headquarters is in Bentonville, Arkansas, with primary hubs in the San Francisco Bay area and New York/New Jersey. Benefits: Benefits: Beyond our great compensation package, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include 401(k) match, stock purchase plan, paid maternity and parental leave, PTO, multiple health plans, and much more. Equal Opportunity Employer: Walmart, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity 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. The above information has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed in the role. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all responsibilities and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job. The full Job Description can be made available as part of the hiring process. ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ‎ 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 6 years’ experience in software engineering or related area. Option 2: 8 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 4 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. Primary Location... 1395 Crossman Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1114, United States of America Walmart and its subsidiaries are committed to maintaining a drug-free workplace and has a no tolerance policy regarding the use of illegal drugs and alcohol on the job. This policy applies to all employees and aims to create a safe and productive work environment.