Principal, Software Engineer (Istio)

Skillset: Golang with service mesh platform (e.g., Istio or equivalent)

Experience range: 11 to 16 years

About the team

Run Time Platforms (RTP), a division of Global Technology Platform (GTP), builds the core products and platforms that enable application teams to deploy, operate, and scale services consistently across Walmart’s runtime environments. RTP’s mission is to reduce operational complexity and accelerate delivery by providing secure-by-default, reliable, and standardized runtime capabilities—so teams can focus on building customer and associate experiences rather than reinventing infrastructure.

Within RTP, the Service Registry & Service Mesh team provides the foundational connectivity layer for modern distributed systems. We build and operate platforms that make it easy for services to find each other, communicate securely, and be governed consistently across clusters, environments, and markets. Our work underpins service-to-service communication for a large fleet of microservices and supports high-throughput, latency-sensitive workloads.

What You’ll Do

Lead the technical strategy and architecture for the service mesh platform (e.g., Istio or equivalent) across multi-cluster, multi-environment deployments.

• Drive design and implementation of traffic management, resiliency patterns, and secure service-to-service communication (mTLS, authZ/authN, policy).
• Build and evolve platform capabilities for onboarding services at scale (templates, golden paths, automation, self-service workflows).
• Partner with application, SRE, security, and network teams to define standards for service connectivity, identity, and zero-trust posture.
• Own performance, reliability, and scalability goals for the mesh control/data plane; define SLOs/SLIs and operational runbooks.
• Establish observability standards (metrics, logs, traces) and enable end-to-end visibility across services and clusters.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for incident response, root cause analysis, and long-term remediation.
• Evaluate and introduce new mesh capabilities (ambient/service-less patterns, gateways, WASM/extensibility, multi-tenancy) with clear ROI.
• Mentor senior engineers, raise engineering rigor (design reviews, technical docs, testing strategy), and influence org-wide adoption.
• Represent the team in architecture forums; communicate trade-offs and align stakeholders on platform roadmaps.

What You’ll bring

• 12–18 years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems and platforms.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes/container orchestration (cluster architecture, networking, upgrades, multi-cluster, RBAC, admission, controllers/operators).
• Strong hands-on experience with service mesh technologies (Istio preferred; Linkerd/Consul/App Mesh acceptable), including:
• Traffic management (routing, retries/timeouts, circuit breaking)
• Proficiency in at least one systems language ( Go preferred; Java/Scala/Python acceptable ) and experience building operators/controllers is a plus.
• Security (mTLS, cert management, identity, policy)
• Gateways/ingress/egress patterns and service discovery
• Control plane operations and upgrade strategies
• Strong understanding of cloud-native networking (CNI, Envoy/L7 proxies, DNS, east-west traffic, gateways, load balancing).
• Proven track record of designing for reliability and scale: SRE principles, SLOs, capacity planning, and failure-mode analysis.
• Experience building platform tooling and automation (GitOps, CI/CD, Helm/Kustomize, Terraform or similar IaC).
• Deep observability experience (Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing) and ability to translate telemetry into action.
• Strong security mindset (zero trust, least privilege, secret management) and experience partnering with security/compliance teams.
• Excellent communication skills—able to drive alignment across engineering orgs and influence without authority.

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-…