Principal, Data Scientist
Walmart · Bentonville, AR
$110,000–$220,000from the description
Jul 10, 2026
Bentonville, AR
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor data science role focused on building and shipping production machine learning systems and autonomous AI agents for Walmart's internal associate-facing tools. Day-to-day work spans NLP pipelines, computer vision, time-series forecasting, and multi-agent orchestration, with an expectation of end-to-end ownership from data pipelines through deployment and monitoring. The role suits an experienced practitioner comfortable working across cloud ML platforms and presenting quantified findings to senior leadership.
Staff level · 5+ years · Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, AR · Full-time
Advertised as Principal, but the requirements read as Staff.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1 people in the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, AR area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 1–1
Applicant volume Light — Few people clear these requirements, so an application that does clear them gets looked at. Worth applying to even if you miss a nice-to-have.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $128,352 (middle half $109,854–$139,052). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The title says 'Principal' but the actual scope — cross-team technical leadership, mentoring, and enterprise-scale architecture — maps more naturally to Staff on a standard career ladder. Principal at Walmart is used here as a job-family grade rather than the rare org-wide authority that the seniority rubric reserves for Principal.
Three qualification paths are offered: (1) Bachelor's + 5 years, (2) Master's + 3 years, or (3) 7 years' experience with no degree — so no degree is a hard gate; the degree requirement is set to None.
The overall years minimum is set to 5 (the lowest qualifying path that includes a degree); the no-degree path requires 7 years.
Spark, Scala, TensorFlow, and WCAG appear only under Preferred Qualifications and are marked accordingly.
The role requires international travel (Canada, Chile, Mexico, South Africa, Europe, UK) — not captured in structured fields but relevant for candidates.
AutoML is mentioned alongside XGBoost/CatBoost/LightGBM/Random Forest as a single ML-algorithms requirement; it is folded into the XGBoost skill's alternatives group rather than emitted as a standalone skill since it names a capability category rather than a specific tool.
The alternative occupation code 15-1252 (Software Developers) is noted because the role places heavy emphasis on building and shipping production ML systems and autonomous AI agents — substantial software engineering work alongside the data science core.
Read the full posting
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