Distinguished, Software Engineer
Walmart · Bengaluru · Posted 2026-07-09
Tech stack: AWS, Cassandra, Kafka, Kubernetes, MongoDB
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About the role
Run Time Platforms (RTP), a division of Global Technology Platform (GTP), is dedicated to developing products and platforms that empower application teams to efficiently deploy and manage runtime environments. This position focuses on our proprietary Identity and Access Management (IAM) system—a core, in-house solution. The IAM platform supports multiple businesses across various countries, handling billions of requests daily and serving as a critical component of our global operations.
As a Distinguished Engineer in Identity and Access Management (IAM) at Walmart, you will set the technical vision and lead the architecture of enterprise-scale IAM capabilities that protect Walmart’s digital ecosystem while enabling seamless experiences for customers, associates, and partners. You will drive end-to-end strategy for authentication, authorization, identity lifecycle, and policy enforcement across a diverse portfolio of applications and platforms, ensuring solutions are secure-by-default, highly available, and built to operate at massive scale.
You will operate as a cross-organization technical leader—partnering with engineering, security, privacy, infrastructure, and product leadership to define reference architectures, establish engineering standards, and influence roadmaps. You will mentor senior engineers, raise the bar on technical rigor, and guide critical architectural decisions and trade-offs. Your deep expertise will help evolve IAM to support modern paradigms (including zero-trust architectures, machine identities, and AI-enabled experiences) while meeting stringent compliance requirements and delivering measurable improvements in reliability, performance, and security for systems that impact millions of customers and associates.
Responsibilities:
- Set the long-term technical vision and reference architecture for Walmart’s IAM platforms (authentication, authorization, identity lifecycle, policy enforcement).
- Lead architecture and design reviews for critical IAM services, ensuring secure-by-default, highly available, resilient, and scalable implementations.
- Drive modernization initiatives (e.g., zero-trust patterns, policy-as-code, fine-grained authorization, service-to-service identity) across the IAM ecosystem.
- Partner with Application teams, Security, Privacy, Infrastructure, and Product leaders to align platform strategy with business priorities, risk posture, and compliance needs.
- Define and enforce engineering standards for reliability, performance, observability, incident response, and secure SDLC across IAM services.
- Guide technical decisions for global, multi-region deployments to meet latency, availability, and data residency requirements.
- Identify systemic risks and architectural gaps; lead mitigation plans for vulnerabilities, abuse vectors, and operational bottlenecks.
- Mentor and develop senior engineers and technical leaders; elevate engineering excellence through coaching, design guidance, and technical forums.
- Influence and drive roadmaps across multiple teams, aligning dependencies and ensuring successful delivery of complex, cross-cutting initiatives.
- Establish success metrics (security posture, availability, latency, adoption, developer experience) and drive continuous improvement through measurable outcomes.
- Build, test and deploy cutting edge solutions at scale, impacting associates of Walmart worldwide
- Ensures the maintenance, patching, operating, and monitoring of IAM systems.
- Troubleshoots and resolves system incidents, problems and changes, as required
- Engage and support application teams integrating with IAM, SSO, Active Directory and related modules
- Seeking and maintaining knowledge (cross/up skill) of current and upcoming identity security technologies.
Qualifications:
- Deep expertise in IAM concepts and systems: authentication, authorization (RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC), federation (OIDC/OAuth2/SAML), MFA, session management, and identity governance.
- Proven track record leading architecture for large-scale, mission-critical platforms with high availability, low latency, and strong security guarantees.
- Strong security fundamentals, including threat modeling, zero-trust principles, least privilege, secrets management, encryption, and secure-by-design practices.
- Experience designing distributed systems in cloud and hybrid environments, including multi-region resiliency, disaster recovery, and data residency considerations.
- Demonstrated ability to influence across organizations—driving alignment among engineering, product, security, and operations stakeholders.
- Expertise in platform engineering practices: APIs, developer experience, versioning, SLAs/SLOs, observability, and operational excellence.
- Ability to lead complex technical programs spanning multiple teams, with strong prioritization and execution discipline.
- Strong mentoring and technical leadership skills, with a history of raising the bar for senior/staff-level engineers.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to articulate trade-offs to executive and non-technical audiences.
- (Preferred) Experience with modern authorization approaches (policy engines, fine-grained entitlements), machine identity/workload identity, and emerging identity needs for AI-driven systems.
- Experience with RESTful APIs, gRPC, and API documentation (e.g., Swagger/OpenAPI), container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, distributed messaging systems (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SNS/SQS), NoSQL databases (Cosmos DB, Cassandra, MongoDB)
Qualifications
- Deep expertise in IAM concepts and systems: authentication, authorization (RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC), federation (OIDC/OAuth2/SAML), MFA, session management, and identity governance.
- Proven track record leading architecture for large-scale, mission-critical platforms with high availability, low latency, and strong security guarantees.
- Strong security fundamentals, including threat modeling, zero-trust principles, least privilege, secrets management, encryption, and secure-by-design practices.
- Experience designing distributed systems in cloud and hybrid environments, including multi-region resiliency, disaster recovery, and data residency considerations.
- Demonstrated ability to influence across organizations—driving alignment among engineering, product, security, and operations stakeholders.
- Expertise in platform engineering practices: APIs, developer experience, versioning, SLAs/SLOs, observability, and operational excellence.
- Ability to lead complex technical programs spanning multiple teams, with strong prioritization and execution discipline.
- Strong mentoring and technical leadership skills, with a history of raising the bar for senior/staff-level engineers.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to articulate trade-offs to executive and non-technical audiences.
- (Preferred)
- Experience with modern authorization approaches (policy engines, fine-grained entitlements), machine identity/workload identity, and emerging identity needs for AI-driven systems.
- Experience with RESTful APIs, gRPC, and API documentation (e.g., Swagger/OpenAPI), container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, distributed messaging systems (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SNS/SQS), NoSQL databases (Cosmos DB Cassandra, MongoDB)
Responsibilities
- Set the long-term technical vision and reference architecture for Walmart’s IAM platforms (authentication, authorization, identity lifecycle, policy enforcement).
- Lead architecture and design reviews for critical IAM services, ensuring secure-by-default, highly available, resilient, and scalable implementations.
- Drive modernization initiatives (e.g., zero-trust patterns, policy-as-code, fine-grained authorization, service-to-service identity) across the IAM ecosystem.
- Partner with Application teams, Security, Privacy, Infrastructure, and Product leaders to align platform strategy with business priorities, risk posture, and compliance needs.
- Define and enforce engineering standards for reliability, performance, observability, incident response, and secure SDLC across IAM services.
- Guide technical decisions for global, multi-region deployments to meet latency, availability, and data residency requirements.
- Identify systemic risks and architectural gaps; lead mitigation plans for vulnerabilities, abuse vectors, and operational bottlenecks.
- Mentor and develop senior engineers and technical leaders; elevate engineering excellence through coaching, design guidance, and technical forums.
- Influence and drive roadmaps across multiple teams, aligning dependencies and ensuring successful delivery of complex, cross-cutting initiatives.
- Establish success metrics (security posture, availability, latency, adoption, developer experience) and drive continuous improvement through measurable outcomes.
- Build, test and deploy cutting edge solutions at scale, impacting associates of Walmart worldwide
- Ensures the maintenance, patching, operating, and monitoring of IAM systems.
- Troubleshoots and resolves system incidents, problems and changes, as required
- Engage and support application teams integrating with IAM, SSO, Active Directory and related modules
- Seeking and maintaining knowledge (cross/up skill) of current and upcoming identity security technologies.