(USA) Senior Data Scientist, Tech

Position Summary...

What you'll do...

Senior Data Scientist – Generative AI (Financial Planning & Analysis)

What you’ll do:

We are a Generative AI team building product-focused solutions around summarization, severity classification, chatbots, and text-to-SQL interfaces. Our models power React-based applications serving thousands of users across finance and operations, with a focus on low-latency, scalable, and context-aware NLP systems. We integrate finetuned foundational models with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and prompt engineering to deliver seamless GenAI experiences across the FP&A landscape.

In this role, you will:

• Design, fine-tune, and evaluate LLMs for mission-critical financial and operational use cases, including:
  • Forecast variance summarization from structured planning systems,
  • Severity classification of exception reports and business risk narratives,
  • Text-to-SQL generation over analytical datasets for self-service finance queries,
  • Enterprise chatbots for navigating planning tools and surfacing KPIs on demand.
• Train custom NLP models for sequence classification, semantic similarity, named entity recognition, and question-answering, grounded in financial and operational text data.
• Lead the end-to-end development of LLM-powered pipelines using LangChain, Hugging Face Transformers, and OpenAI APIs, tightly integrated with financial metadata and metrics catalogs.
• Optimize model serving for interactive and batch applications, ensuring low-latency inference, GPU efficiency, and robust failover handling.
• Work across data engineering and platform teams to implement GenAI solutions on cloud-native stacks (Vertex AI, BigQuery), and manage model monitoring, logging, and versioning.
• Partner closely with finance, product, and engineering teams to translate evolving business needs into robust GenAI workflows and actionable insights.
• Develop evaluation frameworks and internal benchmarks for hallucination detection, explanation generation, and user satisfaction.

What you’ll bring:

• Master's degree + 1 year experience or PhD in NLP, ML, AI, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field.
• Hands-on experience fine-tuning LLMs (e.g., BERT, T5, GPT, LLaMA) using techniques like LoRA, PEFT, QLoRA, or full-model adaptation.
• Strong foundation in core NLP tasks like summarization, classification, entity extraction, text generation.
• Proficient in Python and experienced with PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, LangChain, and vector search (MILVUS, Chroma).
• Deep understanding of prompt engineering, retrieval integration, and embedding-based search in production LLM systems.
• Comfortable working with structured and unstructured financial datasets, and building NLP models for Text-SQL use cases.
• Strong software engineering skills, experience in cloud platforms (GCP, Azure), and practical knowledge of model deployment at scale.

Great to have:

• Exposure to financial systems and FP&A workflows (e.g., planning variances, cost center analysis, operational exception reporting).
• Experience building text-to-SQL agents, explainable LLMs, or domain-adapted semantic parsers.
• Familiarity with LLMOps, model evaluation dashboards, and continuous improvement through user feedback loops.
• Strong sense of product-thinking and ability to build GenAI tools with measurable business impact.
• Growth mindset, ability to navigate ambiguity, and comfort operating in cross-functional environments.

Behavioral Qualifications:

• Self-starter with a problem-solving mindset, comfort with ambiguity, and ability to adapt quickly in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong communication skills to translate complex technical findings into actionable insights for non-technical stakeholders.
• A collaborative approach with a bias for action, ownership mindset, and a passion for learning and innovation.

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.

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You will also receive PTO and/or PPTO that can be used for vacation, sick leave, holidays, or other purposes. The amount you receive depends on your job classification and length of employment. It will meet or exceed the requirements of paid sick leave laws, where applicable.

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For information about PTO, see https://one.walmart.com/notices.

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Live Better U is a Walmart-paid education benefit program for full-time and part-time associates in Walmart and Sam's Club facilities. Programs range from high school completion to bachelor's degrees, including English Language Learning and short-form certificates. Tuition, books, and fees are completely paid for by Walmart.

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Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits and may depend on your job classification and length of employment. Benefits are subject to change and may be subject to a specific plan or program terms.

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For information about benefits and eligibility, see One.Walmart.

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The annual salary range for this position is $73,000.00-$127,000.00

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Additional compensation includes annual or quarterly performance bonuses.

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Additional compensation for certain positions may also include:

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- Regional Pay Zone (RPZ) (based on location)

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- Stock

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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 Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field and 3
years' experience in an analytics related field. Option 2- Master’s degree in Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science,
Information Technology, or related field and 1 years' experience in an analytics related field. Option 3 - 5 years' experience in an analytics or
related field.

Preferred Qualifications...

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

Data science, machine learning, optimization models, Master’s degree in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Information Technology, Operations Research, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Econometrics, Successful completion of one or more assessments in Python, Spark, Scala, or R, Using open source frameworks (for example, scikit learn, tensorflow, torch)

Primary Location...

805 Se Moberly Ln, Bentonville, AR 72712, United States of America