(IND) PRINCIPAL, SOFTWARE ENGINEER - BE

Job Description Summary As a Principal Engineer on the Marketplace Item Setup team, you will be at the center of building and evolving the systems that power how millions of items are listed, managed, and offered across Walmart’s global e-commerce platforms. You will work at the intersection of scale, reliability, and business impact — designing microservices and event-driven pipelines that process enormous volumes of item catalog data in real time.

You will set the technical direction for the team, mentor senior and staff engineers, collaborate with product and platform partners, and influence engineering standards across Walmart’s Global Tech organization. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role for a seasoned engineer who thrives on solving complex distributed systems problems and is passionate about operational excellence.

About Team The Marketplace Item Setup team is responsible for the foundational systems that manage the complete lifecycle of items and offers on Walmart’s global e-commerce marketplace — serving global markets at massive scale. From item ingestion and enrichment to attribute validation and offer publishing, our platform processes millions of catalog events every day — enabling sellers and internal teams to list, update, and manage products across multiple markets and geographies.

We are a fast-paced engineering team working at the forefront of Walmart’s global growth strategy. We build and operate distributed, cloud-native systems using modern Java stacks, event streaming (Kafka), Azure cloud services (including Azure Cosmos DB), and Walmart’s cloud-native infrastructure (WCNP). We are deeply invested in engineering excellence, platform reliability, and developer productivity.

What You’ll Do Architect and deliver scalable backend systems – Lead the end-to-end design and implementation of high-throughput, low-latency Java microservices handling item catalog ingestion, validation, transformation, and offer publishing across global markets.

Drive technical strategy and engineering standards – Define and champion architectural patterns, coding standards, and best practices for the team; conduct design reviews, guide ADRs (Architecture Decision Records), and influence platform-level decisions across the Global Marketplace engineering organization.

Lead complex problem-solving across distributed systems – Own the resolution of critical production issues, performance bottlenecks, and systemic reliability gaps; apply deep expertise in distributed systems, event-driven architectures (Kafka), NoSQL data stores (Cosmos DB), and cloud-native deployments (Kubernetes/WCNP on Azure).

Mentor and grow engineering talent – Coach senior and staff engineers through pair programming, code reviews, and design discussions; help build a culture of technical rigor, ownership, and continuous learning within the team.

Collaborate cross-functionally to deliver business outcomes – Partner with Product Management, Data Engineering, Platform teams, and global market stakeholders to translate complex business requirements into robust, maintainable technical solutions with measurable impact.

What You’ll Bring Deep Java and distributed systems expertise – 12+ years of software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Java (8/11/17+), Spring Boot, microservices architecture, REST and gRPC APIs, and high-scale distributed systems design patterns.

Event-driven and streaming systems experience – Hands-on experience building production systems with Apache Kafka or equivalent event streaming platforms; solid understanding of eventual consistency, idempotency, and at-least-once/exactly-once processing semantics.

Cloud-native and Azure platform expertise – Experience designing and operating services on Kubernetes-based platforms (WCNP/Azure AKS or equivalent); hands-on exposure to Azure cloud services including Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Monitor; familiarity with observability tooling (metrics, logging, distributed tracing), CI/CD pipelines, and SRE principles.

E-commerce or catalog platform domain knowledge – Experience in item/product catalog management, marketplace platforms, or supply chain data systems is strongly preferred; ability to quickly ramp on complex business domains and translate them into elegant technical designs.

Principal-level leadership and communication skills – Proven track record of le…