Senior Manager, Software Engineering

Position Summary... Walmart's Corporate Tech & Services (CTS), Finance Tech pillar, is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead multiple engineering squads building scalable, intelligent FinTech platforms. This is a senior leadership role that combines deep technical credibility with strong people and delivery management — owning end-to-end roadmap execution, hiring and growing engineering talent, and driving cross-functional alignment with product, data science, and senior stakeholders. The ideal candidate brings 12+ years of software engineering experience — with a solid full-stack background spanning Java, Spring Boot, Scala, React, Kafka, and distributed data systems — along with 3+ years of hands-on engineering management experience. They are expected to engage meaningfully in architecture decisions, uphold a high engineering bar across the team, and guide the responsible adoption of GenAI capabilities in production — setting clear standards around governance, output quality, and AI safety. Strong communication skills to represent engineering outcomes, risks, and investments to executive leadership are essential. Beyond delivery and technical leadership, this role is fundamentally about people. The right candidate builds inclusive, high-performing teams, invests seriously in engineer growth and career development, and creates an environment where engineers do the best work of their careers. This is not a role for someone who manages from a distance — we expect presence, engagement, and the ability to think both in the details and several moves ahead on strategy, org design, and capability building. What you'll do... About the Team You will lead an Engineering team that builds and operates scalable, intelligent data platforms enabling analytics, automation, and AI-driven decision-making across the organization in the FinTech space. Our work focuses on designing high-performance data systems, ensuring reliability and operational excellence, and integrating Generative AI capabilities to enhance how data is processed, understood, and used. We work at the intersection of full-stack software engineering and applied AI — developing production-grade systems that handle data at scale, automate complex workflows, and drive measurable business impact. As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will shape both the technical direction and the culture of the team, ensuring we ship with quality, operate with discipline, and grow engineers who are proud of what they build. Walmart's Corporate Tech & Services (CTS) is a powerhouse of several exceptional teams delivering world-class technology solutions and services making a profound impact at every level of Walmart. As a key part of Walmart Global Tech, our teams set the bar for operational excellence and leverage emerging technology to support millions of customers, associates, and stakeholders worldwide. What You Will Do : Engineering Leadership & Delivery • Own End-to-End Delivery: Drive the planning, prioritization, and execution of engineering roadmaps across multiple squads — balancing feature delivery, technical debt, reliability, and innovation with clear business alignment. • Set and Uphold Engineering Standards: Define and enforce the team's bar for code quality, system design, observability, and operational readiness — ensuring these standards are consistently applied across full-stack, data, streaming, and AI workloads. • Remove Barriers at Scale: Proactively identify and eliminate blockers impacting team velocity — whether organizational, technical, or process-related — and develop contingency plans to keep delivery on track. • Lead Architectural Decisions: Partner with Principal and Staff Engineers to guide design decisions across backend services (Java, Spring Boot), front-end (React), data pipelines (Scala, Spark), event streaming (Kafka), and AI-augmented systems. • Drive Operational Excellence: Champion observability-first engineering — structured logging, distributed tracing, SLO/SLA definition, and reliability frameworks — ensuring the team owns production, not just code. People Development & Team Building • Hire and Grow Top Engineering Talent: Lead hiring for Staff, Senior, and Mid-level engineers — identifying talent, running structured interviews, and making quality hiring decisions that raise the team's overall capability. • Mentor and Coach Engineers: Invest in the growth of your engineers through regular 1:1s, structured performance conversations, clear development plans, and hands-on technical guidance. • Build a High-Performance, Inclusive Culture: Foster a team environment grounded in psychological safety, belonging, and high standards — where engineers feel empowered to take ownership, raise concerns, and do their best work. • Develop Future Leaders: Identify and grow senior individual contributors and leads within the team, creating a strong internal pipeline of engineering ownership and technical leadership. • Recognize and Reward Impact: Acknowledge strong contributions consistently and deliberately — reinforcing the behaviours and outcomes the team values most. Strategy & Stakeholder Management • Translate Business Goals into Engineering Plans: Partner with product, data science, and business leadership to translate strategic priorities into clearly scoped, technically sound engineering roadmaps with measurable outcomes. • Communicate Across Levels: Represent the team's work, risks, and outcomes clearly to senior stakeholders — from sprint-level delivery updates to executive-level investment and impact narratives, including AI adoption and ROI. • Drive Cross-Functional Alignment: Build strong working relationships with peer engineering managers, principal engineers, product managers, and operations teams to ensure smooth cross-team dependencies and delivery. • Evaluate and Evolve Ways of Working: Continuously assess the effectiveness of team processes, rituals, and tooling — soliciting feedback, identifying inefficiencies, and driving improvements that improve quality, speed, and developer experience. AI Strategy & Adoption • Embed AI into Team Workflows: Lead the team's adoption of GenAI capabilities — from AI-assisted development and code review to integrating LLM-powered features into production systems — with a focus on measurable productivity and quality gains. • Set Responsible AI Standards: Define and own the team's standards for responsible AI engineering — prompt governance, output auditing, model versioning, and bias awareness — ensuring AI components are production-safe and auditable. • Stay Ahead of the Curve: Evaluate emerging AI frameworks, LLM APIs, and agentic patterns — guiding the team on when and how to adopt them with engineering rigour rather than hype. Compliance & Integrity • Uphold Walmart's Values and Policies: Champion and model Walmart's standards of ethics, integrity, and compliance — ensuring the team operates consistently within company policies and open-door principles. • Engage with the Broader Engineering Community: Participate in and contribute to Walmart Global Tech's engineering community through forums, design reviews, mentorship programs, and knowledge-sharing initiatives. What you will bring • 12+ years of overall Software Engineering experience, including 3+ years in an Engineering Manager role leading multiple squads or a mid-to-large engineering team. • Strong technical foundation across the full stack — hands-on background spanning backend services (Java, Spring Boot, Scala), front-end (React), data pipelines (Spark), and event streaming (Kafka); credible enough to engage deeply in system design and architectural trade-offs. • Proven experience leading distributed, event-driven system design — including Kafka-based streaming architectures, CQRS, pub/sub patterns, and real-time data processing at scale. • Demonstrated people leadership — track record of hiring, developing, and retaining stro