SENIOR DIRECTOR, DATA SCIENCE

Position Summary...

To accelerate Sam’s aggressive growth goals, we are seeking a strategic and execution-oriented leader to accelerate delivery across enterprise-critical initiatives focused on membership growth strategy, member value and innovation using data-driven insights. This role will serve at the intersection of data, product and analytics to transform Walmart’s membership value proposition and unlock scalable growth opportunities.

What you'll do...

About the Team

Working at Sam’s Club means a career without boundaries. There’s always room to grow, to take on another challenge, to roll up your sleeves and contribute, and to find professional rewards for your hard work. Yes, we are a division of the Fortune #1 company, Walmart, Inc. But you’ll quickly find that we’re a company that wants you to feel comfortable bringing your whole self to work. A career at Sam’s Club is where the world’s most complex challenges meet a kinder way of life. Our mission spreads far beyond the walls of our clubs.

What you'll do:

The Senior Director will focus on

1. Strategic Leadership & Vision

Define and drive the data science strategy aligned with Sam’s Club’s overall business objectives.

crafting and operationalizing future-ready membership models, identifying high-impact new club locations and partner with peers to enable Next Best Action (NBA) frameworks and conversational AI capabilities on enterprise data products.

Serve as a thought leader on AI/ML innovation and data-driven culture across the enterprise.

2. Team Building & Talent Development

Lead, mentor, and grow a multi-disciplinary data science team including ML engineers, data scientists, and analysts.

Build a high-performing team culture focused on innovation, experimentation, and outcomes.

Ensure talent pipelines, learning, and development pathways are aligned to evolving business and tech needs.

3. Cross-Functional Collaboration

Partner with product, engineering, merchandising, supply chain, marketing, and membership teams to co-create data products and solutions.

Translate complex business questions into clear data science problems and actionable solutions.

Influence senior executives and stakeholders with data-backed insights and storytelling.

4. Model Development & Deployment

Oversee the development of ML models and AI systems for key use cases: demand forecasting, personalization, inventory optimization, pricing, fraud detection, and member engagement.

Ensure models are robust, explainable, scalable, and continuously improved in production environments.

Maintain high standards in model governance, monitoring, fairness, and compliance.

5. Operational Excellence & Delivery

Drive data science project delivery from problem framing to experimentation, development, deployment, and measurement of impact.

Establish OKRs, KPIs, and success metrics for all initiatives and ensure value realization.

Create standardized processes for reusability, documentation, and knowledge sharing.

6. Innovation & Emerging Technologies

Stay ahead of AI/ML trends including GenAI, LLMs, causal inference, reinforcement learning, and optimization.

Lead experimentation on next-gen algorithms and tools that can drive competitive advantage.

Build partnerships with academia, vendors, and the broader AI/ML community.

What you’ll bring:

• 15+ years of experience in strategy, data products, advanced analytics, or related fields. Ability to act as a strategic consultant. 

• Proven experience in driving cross-functional initiatives with multiple stakeholder groups. 

• Understanding of membership models, customer lifecycle metrics, or retail operations is preferred. 

• Strong analytical background; ability to structure problems, analyze data, and drive insight-to-action cycles. 

• Familiarity with AI/ML and modern data product infrastructure (360 data views, conversational interfaces). 

• Excellent communication and executive storytelling skills. 

• Ability to operate in a highly matrixed, fast-paced environment. 

Success Metrics 

• Timely delivery of foundational initiatives. 

• Tangible business impact: increased member engagement, optimized club growth strategy, and scalable self-serve analytics. 

• Cross-team alignment and adoption of strategic recommendations and tools. 

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 expert's 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, hybrid work
We use a hybrid way of working with primary in office presence coupled with an optimal mix of virtual presence. We use our campuses to collaborate and be together in person, as business needs require and for development and networking opportunities. This approach helps us make quicker decisions, remove location barriers across our global team, be more flexible in our 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.

Minimum Qualifications:Option 1: Bachelor's degree in Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Technology or related field and 7 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 5 years' experience in an analytics related field. Option 3: 9 years' experience in an analytics or related field. 3 years' supervisory experience.

Preferred Qualifications...

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

Primary Location...

4,5,6, 7 Floor, Building 10, Sez, Cessna Business Park, Kadubeesanahalli Village, Varthur Hobli , India