This role pays more than
72%
of similar roles. Most pay
$169,550–$218,700
— the shaded band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$214k
versus about
$194k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About Walmart
Walmart Inc. is the world''s largest retailer by revenue, operating a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores, as well as a growing e-commerce presence through Walmart.com. Industry: General Merchandise & Grocery Retail
Walmart currently has
184 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$117,000–$234,000
across 180 roles with salary data.
As a Principal, Software Engineer on the Data Security Platform team, you will design and build highly scalable distributed systems to protect petabytes of data at rest and in motion across structured and unstructured sources. You will architect resilient services for authentication, authorization, audit logging, and least-privilege enforcement while solving complex challenges in real-time policy enforcement and low-latency access control. The role requires extensive experience with Java, Go, SQL, and NoSQL databases, alongside deep knowledge of JVM internals, multithreaded programming, and storage engine optimization. You will drive technical strategy, mentor engineers, and lead critical design reviews to ensure operational excellence. This position addresses the core challenge of balancing security, privacy, and compliance within a large-scale enterprise environment by building robust infrastructure for identity management and data protection across diverse systems and applications.
What does a Software Engineer earn in California?
Median $214000 from 775 postings across 63 companies.
Architect and build large-scale distributed systems for enterprise data security including authentication, authorization, and auditing.
Develop solutions to enforce fine-grained access controls with minimal performance overhead on petabytes of data.
Drive technical strategy and influence cross-functional engineering teams to align on platform architecture and goals.
Optimize system performance, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence for high-availability cloud-native services.
Mentor engineers and establish best practices to foster engineering excellence across the organization.
Lead critical design reviews and maintain architectural decision records to ensure transparency in technical planning.
Translate ambiguous business requirements into actionable technical specifications and measurable success metrics.
Integrate AI-enhanced capabilities and intelligent software systems into the data security platform.
What we're looking for
Must have a Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field with 5 years of software engineering experience, or 7 years of experience without a degree.
Requires 10+ years of software engineering experience building large-scale distributed systems.
Requires 5+ years of experience designing and architecting complex distributed systems in production environments.
Requires 10+ years of hands-on experience with Java and Go.
Requires 10+ years of experience with SQL and NoSQL databases.
Must have deep knowledge of JVM internals, multithreaded programming, and database performance tuning.
Must possess strong leadership skills to mentor engineers and drive technical strategy across cross-functional teams.
Preferred candidates have experience in security platforms, cloud-native microservices, and digital accessibility standards.