Distinguished, Software Engineer

Position Summary... Global Technology Platform (GTP) is seeking a Distinguished Engineer for the Service Mesh team within Run Time Platforms (RTP). In this role, you will shape the technical direction for a foundational platform that enables secure, reliable, and observable service-to-service communication at scale. You will drive architecture and engineering excellence for service mesh capabilities across Kubernetes-based runtime environments, influencing standards and adoption across a broad ecosystem of platform and application teams. This is a highly visible, high-impact role focused on building scalable platform primitives, accelerating developer velocity, and strengthening Walmart’s zero-trust posture through consistent traffic governance and policy enforcement.

What you'll do... About the team Run Time Platforms (RTP), a division of Global Technology Platform (GTP), builds the core products and platforms that enable application teams to deploy, operate, and scale services consistently across Walmart’s runtime environments. RTP’s mission is to reduce operational complexity and accelerate delivery by providing secure-by-default, reliable, and standardized runtime capabilities—so teams can focus on building customer and associate experiences rather than reinventing infrastructure. Within RTP, the Service Registry & Service Mesh team provides the foundational connectivity layer for modern distributed systems. We build and operate platforms that make it easy for services to find each other, communicate securely, and be governed consistently across clusters, environments, and markets. Our work underpins service-to-service communication for a large fleet of microservices and supports high-throughput, latency-sensitive workloads.

As a Distinguished Engineer on the RTP Service Mesh team, you will lead the architecture, strategy, and technical execution of a service mesh platform (Istio or similar) supporting large-scale microservices workloads. You will operate at enterprise scope—defining reference architectures, driving multi-cluster patterns, ensuring operational excellence, and partnering with security, networking, SRE, and product teams to deliver a platform that is secure-by-default and easy to adopt. You will also mentor senior engineers and influence technical decisions across GTP to raise the bar on platform reliability, performance, and developer experience.

What You’ll Do

Define and own the long-term technical vision and reference architecture for the Service Mesh platform across GTP. Lead design and implementation of enterprise-scale Istio (or similar) deployments, including multi-cluster topologies, upgrades, and lifecycle management. Establish standards for service-to-service security (workload identity, mTLS, authorization policy, egress controls) aligned to zero-trust principles. Drive scalable patterns for traffic management and resiliency (routing, failover, timeouts/retries, circuit breaking) for latency-sensitive, high-throughput services. Architect and evolve multi-cluster connectivity (east-west traffic, cross-cluster discovery, gateway strategy), including failure-domain isolation and disaster recovery. Champion operational excellence: define SLIs/SLOs, capacity models, performance benchmarks, and runbooks; lead post-incident technical remediation. Build platform capabilities that improve developer experience: onboarding automation, self-service workflows, guardrails, and golden paths. Partner deeply with networking, security, SRE, and application teams to drive adoption, resolve cross-cutting issues, and align on platform standards. Guide technical decision-making through architecture reviews, design docs, and hands-on prototyping; unblock critical initiatives across teams. Mentor and develop senior engineers; raise engineering rigor in areas such as testing strategy, release quality, and platform operability.

What You’ll bring

18–25 years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems and/or platform infrastructure. Deep expertise with container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes preferred), including networking, service discovery, RBAC, upgrades, and multi-cluster operations. Strong hands-on experience with service mesh technologies (Istio preferred, or Linkerd/Consul/App Mesh), including security, traffic management, and gateways. Expert-level understanding of cloud-native networking concepts: L4/L7 proxying (e.g., Envoy), DNS/service discovery, ingress/egress, east-west traffic, and network policy. Proven track record designing platforms for high availability, reliability, and performance, including SRE practices, observability, and incident management at scale. Experience driving enterprise architecture across multiple teams—setting standards, influencing roadmaps, and aligning stakeholders without direct authority. Strong security fundamentals: zero trust, certificate and key lifecycle concepts, secrets management, least privilege, and defense-in-depth. Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Go, Java, Python) and ability to build platform tooling, controllers/operators, or integrations. Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex trade-offs to both technical and executive audiences.

About Walmart Global Tech

Imagine working in an environment where one line of code can make life easier for hundreds of millions of people. That’s what we do at Walmart Global Tech. We’re a team of software engineers, data scientists, cybersecurity experts and service professionals within the world’s leading retailer who make an epic impact and are at the forefront of the next retail disruption. People are why we innovate, and people power our innovations. We are people-led and tech-empowered. We train our team in the skillsets of the future and bring in experts like you to help us grow. We have roles for those chasing their first opportunity as well as those looking for the opportunity that will define their career. Here, you can kickstart a great career in tech, gain new skills and experience for virtually every industry, or leverage your expertise to innovate at scale, impact millions and reimagine the future of retail. Flexible Work Walmart’s culture sets us apart, and we know being together helps us innovate, learn and grow great careers. This role is based in our Bangalore office for daily work, with the flexibility for associates to manage their personal lives.

Benefits

• Beyond our great compensation package, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include a host of best-in-class benefits maternity and parental leave, PTO, health benefits, and much more.

Belonging We aim to create a culture where every associate feels valued for who they are, rooted in respect for the individual. Our goal is to foster a sense of belonging, to create opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers, and to be a Walmart for everyone. At Walmart, our vision is "everyone included." By fostering a workplace culture where everyone is—and feels—included, everyone wins. Our associates and customers reflect the makeup of all 19 countries where we operate. By making Walmart a welcoming place where all people feel like they belong, we’re able to engage associates, strengthen our business, improve our ability to serve customers, and support the communities where we operate.

Minimum Qualifications... Outlined below are the required minimum qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no minimum qualifications.

Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 6 years’ experience in software engineering or related area. Option 2: 8 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.

Preferred Qualifications... Outlined below are the optional preferred qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no preferred qualifications.

Master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 4 years' experience in software engineering or related area, We value candidates with a background in creating inclusive digital experiences, demonstrating knowledge in implementing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standards, assistive technologies, and integrating digital accessibility seamlessly. The ideal candidate would have knowledge of accessibility best practices and join us as we continue to create accessible products and services following Walmart’s accessibility standards and guidelines for supporting an inclusive culture.

Primary Location... Building 10 (sez), Cessna Business Park, Kadubeesanahalli Village, Varthur Hobli , India