Distinguished, Software Engineer
Walmart · Bengaluru · 12+ yrs experience · Posted 2026-07-01
Tech stack: Azure, C++, Go, Java, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, SQL
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About the role
The Data Services team within Global Technology Platform powers mission-critical data infrastructure across the enterprise, enabling SQL, NoSQL, and messaging services for tens of thousands of deployments across Walmart Global Tech. These platforms support multi-petabyte-scale data, millions of requests per second, and extremely high availability requirements for applications used across Walmart stores, digital channels, supply chain, and internal enterprise systems.
We are looking for a Distinguished Engineer — Relational Databases to define and drive the technical vision for relational database platforms at massive scale. This is a senior technical leadership role for an engineer with deep expertise in SQL systems, database internals, query execution, performance optimization, and production operations.
You will shape the architecture and evolution of relational database capabilities across the organization, with a strong focus on PostgreSQL and other SQL systems such as MySQL and Azure SQL. You will work on some of the most complex database challenges in the industry, including query planning and optimization, high availability, scalability, reliability, performance engineering, automation, and operational excellence.
As a Distinguished Engineer, you will operate as a hands-on technical leader, influencing platform strategy, guiding architectural decisions, mentoring senior engineers, and partnering closely with application teams to design and operate complex, high-scale systems. You will help build sophisticated tooling and platforms on top of open-source and commercial database technologies, tailoring them to Walmart’s scale, reliability, security, and developer productivity needs.
Responsibilities:
- Define and drive the long-term technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for relational database platforms within Data Services.
- Lead the design and evolution of highly available, scalable, secure, and operationally efficient SQL platforms that support mission-critical workloads at enterprise scale.
- Provide deep technical leadership in relational database internals, including query planning, query optimization, storage engines, indexing, replication, transactions, concurrency control, and performance tuning.
- Diagnose and resolve complex production issues across large SQL installations, including performance degradation, query regressions, replication issues, availability incidents, capacity constraints, and operational bottlenecks.
- Build and influence sophisticated tooling, automation, and platform capabilities that improve database reliability, performance, observability, developer productivity, and operational simplicity.
- Partner with application engineering teams to design, review, and optimize database architectures for complex distributed systems and high-throughput workloads.
- Establish technical standards, best practices, reference architectures, and operational patterns for relational database usage across the organization.
- Influence senior engineering leaders, architects, product teams, and business stakeholders by clearly communicating technical strategy, trade-offs, risks, and execution plans.
- Mentor principal and senior engineers, raising the technical bar across database engineering, distributed systems, performance engineering, and production operations.
Qualifications:
- 12+ years of software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or database engineering experience, with significant depth in relational database systems.
- Deep hands-on expertise operating SQL systems at scale, preferably PostgreSQL; experience with MySQL, Azure SQL, or comparable relational database technologies is also highly relevant.
- Strong understanding of SQL internals, including query parsing, planning, optimization, execution, indexing, storage, transaction management, locking, replication, and recovery.
- Proven experience debugging and operating complex SQL deployments in production, including high-availability, high-throughput, and low-latency environments.
- Demonstrated ability to diagnose performance issues across the full stack, including query plans, schema design, indexing strategy, database configuration, storage behavior, connection management, and application access patterns.
- Experience designing and operating database platforms with strong reliability, availability, backup and restore, disaster recovery, observability, security, and compliance characteristics.
- Strong systems engineering background, with the ability to reason deeply about distributed systems, concurrency, networking, storage, failure modes, and capacity planning.
- Experience building automation, tooling, or platform capabilities around open-source or commercial database systems.
- Proven ability to define technical strategy, drive architecture across teams, and influence large-scale engineering direction without relying solely on formal authority.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex database and platform concepts to senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong track record of mentoring engineers, reviewing architecture, and raising engineering standards across a large organization.
- Strong programming experience in one or more systems or platform languages such as Java, Python, C++, Go.
Qualifications
- 12+ years of software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or database engineering experience, with significant depth in relational database systems.
- Deep hands-on expertise operating SQL systems at scale, preferably PostgreSQL; experience with MySQL, Azure SQL, or comparable relational database technologies is also highly relevant.
- Strong understanding of SQL internals, including query parsing, planning, optimization, execution, indexing, storage, transaction management, locking, replication, and recovery.
- Proven experience debugging and operating complex SQL deployments in production, including high-availability, high-throughput, and low-latency environments.
- Demonstrated ability to diagnose performance issues across the full stack, including query plans, schema design, indexing strategy, database configuration, storage behavior, connection management, and application access patterns.
- Experience designing and operating database platforms with strong reliability, availability, backup and restore, disaster recovery, observability, security, and compliance characteristics.
- Strong systems engineering background, with the ability to reason deeply about distributed systems, concurrency, networking, storage, failure modes, and capacity planning.
- Experience building automation, tooling, or platform capabilities around open-source or commercial database systems.
- Proven ability to define technical strategy, drive architecture across teams, and influence large-scale engineering direction without relying solely on formal authority.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex database and platform concepts to senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong track record of mentoring engineers, reviewing architecture, and raising engineering standards across a large organization.
- Strong programming experience in one or more systems or platform languages such as Java, Python, C++, Go.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the long-term technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for relational database platforms within Data Services.
- Lead the design and evolution of highly available, scalable, secure, and operationally efficient SQL platforms that support mission-critical workloads at enterprise scale.
- Provide deep technical leadership in relational database internals, including query planning, query optimization, storage engines, indexing, replication, transactions, concurrency control, and performance tuning.
- Diagnose and resolve complex production issues across large SQL installations, including performance degradation, query regressions, replication issues, availability incidents, capacity constraints, and operational bottlenecks.
- Build and influence sophisticated tooling, automation, and platform capabilities that improve database reliability, performance, observability, developer productivity, and operational simplicity.
- Partner with application engineering teams to design, review, and optimize database architectures for complex distributed systems and high-throughput workloads.
- Establish technical standards, best practices, reference architectures, and operational patterns for relational database usage across the organization.
- Influence senior engineering leaders, architects, product teams, and business stakeholders by clearly communicating technical strategy, trade-offs, risks, and execution plans.
- Mentor principal and senior engineers, raising the technical bar across database engineering, distributed systems, performance engineering, and production operations.