Distinguished, Data Scientist - Agent-Led Engageme...

Distinguished Data Scientist for Agent-Led Engagement

Walmart's Next Gen Commerce team is building intelligent, proactive shopping agents that go beyond answering customer questionsthey drive conversations that are timely, personalized, and value-generating. As a Distinguished Data Scientist for Agent-Led Engagement, you will serve as the key IC partner to the Director of Data Science for this space. You will lead the technical vision, model development, and execution strategy behind proactive engagement in Walmart's conversational AI experiences.

Your focus will be to design and implement systems that empower agents to initiate, sustain, and deepen customer conversations. You'll build models that combine large language models (LLMs), structured behavior signals, and long-term customer memory to make real-time decisions about when, how, and why to engage. This work sits at the intersection of language understanding, user modeling, decision science, and personalization.

This is a hands-on, high-impact IC role requiring deep technical expertise and cross-functional influence. You will work closely with the data science team, as well as engineering, product, design and other internal dependent teams to move fast, experiment boldly, and build systems that shape how millions of customers interact with Walmart every day.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement models that drive agent-led engagementincluding topic suggestion, conversation continuation, and goal-driven nudgesbased on short-term context and long-term user understanding.
• Develop LLM-based and hybrid (LLM + traditional ML) systems that detect high-value moments to engage and select relevant actions or content.
• Build real-time ranking and decision systems that incorporate customer history, behavioral signals, and conversational state.
• Define and prototype memory architectures that support persistent customer profiles and dynamic, evolving preferences.
• Collaborate with platform and infra teams to integrate memory and decision modules into the end-to-end conversational stack.
• Partner with product, UX, and engineering to surface proactive suggestions naturally and meaningfully within conversations.
• Contribute to experimentation and evaluation frameworks to measure engagement, relevance, conversion, and long-term impact.
• Review system-level decisions for safety, user experience, and brand alignment.
• Act as a technical thought partner and advisor to the Director of Agent-Led Engagement and other senior leaders in agentic AI.

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in data science, applied AI, or machine learning, with deep focus on personalization, conversational AI, or decision systems.
• Demonstrated technical leadership in LLM-driven experiences, customer engagement modeling, or agentic applications.
• Strong expertise in hybrid modeling (LLM + structured ML), dialogue state modeling, or sequential decision-making.
• Experience designing or contributing to persistent memory systems for user modeling.
• Proven ability to turn ideas into deployed, production-scale systems with measurable impact.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with experience driving alignment across science, product, and engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Ph.D. or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• Experience in conversational commerce, recommendation systems, or task-oriented dialog agents.
• Familiarity with contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, or user modeling at scale.
• Experience working with memory-augmented LLMs or long-context transformer systems.
• Track record of open-source contributions, publications, patents, or public speaking in applied AI or NLP.

Why Join Us?

You'll help define how AI shifts from reactive to proactivefrom answering questions to anticipating needs. Your work will power intelligent agents that not only understand but guide, support, and elevate how customers shop at Walmart. This is a rare opportunity to work at the intersection of state-of-the-art AI and retail at massive scale.

At Walmart, we offer competitive pay as well as performance-based bonus awards and other great benefits for a happier mind, body, and wallet. Health benefits include medical, vision and dental coverage. Financial benefits include 401(k), stock purchase and company-paid life insurance. Paid time off benefits include PTO (including sick leave), parental leave, family care leave, bereavement, jury duty, and voting. Other benefits include short-term and long-term disability, company discounts, Military Leave Pay, adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, and more.

You will also receive PTO and/or PPTO that can be used for vacation, sick leave, holidays, or other purposes. The amount you receive depends on your job classification and length of employment. It will meet or exceed the requirements of paid sick leave laws, where applicable.

Live Better U is a Walmart-paid education benefit program for full-time and part-time associates in Walmart and Sam's Club facilities. Programs range from high school completion to bachelor's degrees, including English Language Learning and short-form certificates. Tuition, books, and fees are completely paid for by Walmart. Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits and may depend on your job classification and length of employment. Benefits are subject to change and may be subject to a specific plan or program terms.

The annual salary range for this position is $169,000.00-$338,000.00 in Sunnyvale, California US-11656 and $130,000.00-$260,000.00 in Bentonville, Arkansas US-10735. Additional compensation includes annual or quarterly performance bonuses. Additional compensation for certain positions may also include: Stock.

Primary Location

1375 Crossman Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1114, United States of America

About Walmart

At Walmart, we help people save money so they can live better. This mission serves as the foundation for every decision we make, from responsible sourcing to sustainabilityand everything in between. As a Walmart associate, you will play an integral role in shaping the future of retail, tech, merchandising, finance and hundreds of other industriesall while affecting the lives of millions of customers all over the world. Here, your work makes an impact every day. What are you waiting for? 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, abilities, ideas and opinions- while welcoming all people.