Data Scientist – Conversational AI

Position: Staff, Data Scientist – Conversational AI
Location: Elkins

Position Summary... What you'll do... Cortex Team is Walmart’s core A.I. conversational platform, powering the vision of delivering the world’s best personal assistants to Walmart’s customers, accessible via natural voice commands, text messages, rich UI interactions, and a mix of all of the above via multi-modal experiences. We believe conversations are a natural and powerful user interface for interacting with technology and enable a richer customer experiences – both online and in-store.

We are building and designing the next generation of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) services that other teams can easily integrate and leverage, and build rich experiences: from pure voice and text shopping assistants (Siri, Sparky ), to customer care channels, to mobile apps with rich, intertwined, multi-modal interaction modes ( ). Interested in diving in? We need passionate and seasoned NLP data-scientists to help us improve and evolve our capabilities, taking into account the full conversational context, multi-modal interactions, and an ever increasing list of use cases.

Come at the right time, and you will have an enormous opportunity to make a massive impact on the design, architecture, and implementation of an innovative, mission critical product, driven by data-science, used every day, by people you know, and which customers love. As part of the emerging tech group, you will also have the additional opportunity of building demos, proof of concepts, creating white papers, writing blogs, etc.

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience with Python; solid knowledge SQL.
• Hands on experience with classical ML models, test/train/evaluation metrics, key parameters/techniques that affect model performance
• Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets.
• Familiarity and ideally experience with NLU/NLP, more recent deep ML models (e.g., Transformers, BERT, Llama, Gpts, Gemini) and safe fine-tuning of these.
• A business analytical mind; ability to communicate with consumers of the model and present results in intuitive ways.
• Experience analyzing data to identify patterns and conducting error/deviation analysis; passion for fixing issues in the data and finding the optimal representation.
• Ability to take a project from scoping requirements through actual launch.
• A continuous drive to explore, improve, enhance, automate, and optimize models and products.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.
• Bachelor’s degree or certification in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or any other related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to real-world, production grade agentic systems.
• Familiarity with LLMs serving optimizations and multi-Lo Ra
• Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations
• Strong attention to detail and exceptional level of organization
• Proven ability to achieve results in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment
• Hands-on expertise in many disparate technologies and the full model lifecycle, typically ranging from data pipelines, data extraction, model training, model serving, labeling tools, ML-ops, ad-hoc tooling and all points in between.
• PhD in a relevant field (Machine Learning, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, Statistics or a related field)

At Walmart, we offer competitive pay as well as performance-based bonus awards and other great benefits for a happier mind, body, and wallet. Health benefits include medical, vision and dental coverage. Financial benefits include 401(k), stock purchase and company-paid life insurance. Paid time off benefits include PTO (including sick leave), parental leave, family care leave, bereavement, jury duty, and voting.

Other benefits include short-term and long-term disability, company discounts, Military Leave Pay, adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, and more. You will also receive PTO and/or PPTO that can be used for vacation, sick leave, holidays, or other purposes. The…