(USA) Principal, Software Engineer

Role summary:

The Principal Software Engineer on Walmart's Private Cloud Storage Engineering team architects and operates some of the largest Ceph storage clusters in the industry, supporting hundreds of petabytes of mission-critical data. This hands-on technical leader drives the design, scalability, performance optimization, and automation of distributed storage platforms across multiple global production environments. Partnering closely with computer, networking, security, and cloud engineering teams, they deliver highly available storage solutions that meet demanding SLAs for latency, throughput, resiliency, and scalability. The role requires deep expertise in Ceph, Linux internals, OpenStack, and large-scale infrastructure, along with a proven ability to mentor engineers, influence technical strategy, and contribute to open-source storage communities.

About the team:

Walmart's Private Cloud Storage Engineering team designs and operates some of the largest Ceph storage clusters worldwide, managing extensive data across multiple sites. The team supports critical workloads for business operations, customer platforms, and innovation projects. Working at the convergence of distributed storage, Linux internals, networking, and cloud infrastructure, the team addresses complex challenges in scalability, performance, and resilience. Emphasizing technical expertise, automation, and observability, the team collaborates with engineers across computer, networking, security, and cloud domains to advance enterprise storage solutions at Walmart's scale.

What you'll do:

• Architect, deploy, and manage large-scale Ceph storage clusters across global production environments, ensuring high availability, durability, and scalability through advanced CRUSH map design, erasure coding, and replication strategies.
• Design, develop, and maintain Ceph CSI and Cinder CSI drivers to provide persistent, resilient, and high-performance storage services for containerized workloads on Walmart's Cloud Native Platform.
• Troubleshoot and optimize performance across the storage, Linux, and networking stacks, leveraging tools such as perf, blktrace, bpftrace, and tcpdump to identify and resolve complex bottlenecks.
• Build and enhance automation for cluster provisioning, lifecycle management, capacity expansion, monitoring, and operations using Ansible, Terraform, and Python.
• Lead root cause analysis for critical production incidents, mentor engineers on storage architecture and best practices, and contribute to the Ceph and Kubernetes CSI open-source communities.

What you'll bring:

• 15+ years of experience in distributed storage systems and Linux infrastructure engineering, including 10+ years of hands-on expertise designing, deploying, and operating large-scale Ceph environments at petabyte scale.
• Extensive experience developing, enhancing, and supporting Ceph CSI and Cinder CSI drivers to provide persistent storage for cloud-native, containerized platforms.
• Deep knowledge of Linux internals, kernel tuning, storage architectures, and networking technologies, including TCP/IP, BGP, RDMA, BlueStore, RocksDB, OSD architecture, and erasure coding.
• Strong experience troubleshooting and optimizing system performance using tools such as perf, blktrace, tcpdump, bpftrace, and eBPF, with proven expertise in infrastructure automation using Python, Ansible, and Terraform.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, OpenStack (Cinder and Swift), and public cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

The annual salary range for this position is $143,000.00 - $286,000.00

Additional compensation includes annual or quarterly performance bonuses.

Additional compensation for certain positions may also include :

• Stock