Data Engineer Director

Walmart is not just the largest retailer in the world — we’re also leaders in supply chain innovation driven by cutting-edge data and analytics. As part of our Costa Rica-based End-to-End Data & Analytics team, you’ll be at the heart of building a data foundation that fuels smarter decisions, optimizes supply chain operations, improves transportation efficiency, and enables next-gen store performance. Transform data into impact and help our innovation take flight!

Your Mission:

As a Data Engineering Director, you are the enterprise-scale technical authority responsible for shaping and evolving our data platform architecture to power intelligent, autonomous systems at scale.

You will play a pivotal role in shaping the technical direction of our data engineering efforts, focusing on scalable distributed systems, data processing, and generative AI. Your expertise will be critical in guiding our organization's technical strategy, ensuring the robustness, scalability, and innovation of our product.

Your mission is to architect and steward the foundational data systems that enable AI agents, copilots, and large-scale analytics to operate with reliability, and enterprise-grade trust.

You do not simply build systems—you define how the organization builds systems. You will also lead a team of data engineers and analyst.

What You’ll Do:

• Define Enterprise Data Architecture

Architect and evolve the core data platform strategy across batch, streaming, and hybrid systems to support both traditional analytics and AI-native workloads.

Establish and steward architectural standards that unify structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data across domains.

• Lead Agentic Data Enablement

Define enterprise patterns for agent-ready data, ensuring systems are discoverable, semantically rich, and optimized for LLMs, copilots, and multi-agent workflows.

Shape reference architectures for RAG, real-time feature pipelines, vector indexing, and graph-augmented reasoning.

• Drive Cross-Domain Platform Strategy

Partner with Engineering, AI/ML, Product, and Platform leaders to align roadmaps with long-term autonomous decision-making goals.

Influence and guide multiple teams in adopting scalable patterns without direct authority.

• Architect for Trust, Reliability, and Scale

Define standards for observability, telemetry, lineage, governance, and AI auditability across enterprise data systems.

Design resilient, fault-tolerant systems that support millions of users and mission-critical retail operations.

• Modernize Legacy Systems

Lead modernization initiatives that transform traditional data lake systems into composable, event-driven, and agent-aware platforms.

Balance short-term delivery with long-term scalability and maintainability.

• Elevate Technical Excellence

Provide hands-on technical guidance and mentorship to data engineers, fostering a culture of learning and innovation.

Lead design reviews and steward architectural decisions across high-risk, high-impact initiatives.

Raise the technical bar for the organization through principled engineering standards.

What We’re Looking For (Minimum Qualifications):

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, or a related field + Master’s in Computer Science related field.
• 10+ years of data engineering related experience, with at least 5 years leading/managing teams.
• Proven track record of shaping architecture across multiple domains and organizations.
• Hands on and architecture expertise across data engineering (e.g., ETL/ELT, data modeling), data classification, batch and real-time streaming data platforms (e.g., Spark, Hadoop, Hive, Kafka, dbt, Airflow), and cloud services (e.g., GCS, BigQuery, Vertex AI, Databricks) etc.
• Skills:
• Cloud-native ecosystems knowledge (preferred on GCP), including BigQuery, Dataflow/Airflow, or equivalent.
• Strong understanding of batch and streaming systems, including Kafka and Spark Structured Streaming.
• Fluency in Python, Java or Scala and Spark/PySpark or SQL optimization at scale.
• Exceptional communication in English (C1), teamwork, and relationship-building skills. You need to thrive in a fast-paced, adaptable environment.
• Go-Getter: A demonstrated sense of urgency and strong customer-centric mindset.

Why Join Walmart’s Data Team?

• Impact at Scale: Work with some of the largest datasets in the world, driving decisions that affect millions of customers every day.
• Global Collaboration: Partner with talented data professionals across the globe and grow in a diverse, inclusive culture.
• Innovation Powerhouse: Be on the frontlines of supply chain innovation, optimizing processes with cutting-edge tools and techniques.
• Work-Life Balance: Join a supportive team that values your well-being, with the opportunity to travel and immerse yourself in a global organization.