My First Year at Walmart Global Tech
Last month marked the completion of my first year at Walmart Global Tech. My journey so far has been nothing short of incredible in all aspects (new learnings, exposure, impact, fulfillment). I couldn’t have wished for anything more in my first year.
I joined the organization when remote work was not routine, and I was just started to enjoy the wonderful office culture at the Walmart Reston office. But soon, Covid caused all of us to work remotely. Being new to the team and company, I was apprehensive about the remote work at the start. I was amazed to see how quickly everyone at Walmart adapted, and very soon, working remotely was a new normal. All the collaboration tools and flexibility made it even more seamless and enjoyable.
Before Walmart, I was a Software Engineer at Fannie Mae. What motivated me the most to join Walmart Global Tech was the company slogan: “Save Money, Live Better.” I felt inspired by Walmart’s service — to millions of customers every day; the company provides a seamless shopping experience through Omni channels (Stores and eCommerce). I joined the Walmart payments engineering team. Before joining, I discussed the technology stack, scale, and unification of payment platforms with my manager, which excited me and crystallized my interest in Walmart.
After getting into Walmart, I got several challenging assignments that included comparing reactive frameworks for Java services, decoupling services, and building asynchronous communication mechanisms among the services.
My work involved building certain services from scratch that included utilizing offerings from Walmart’s internal Platforms group. I was thrilled to see the Platform group’s offerings, which allow the application team to innovate with speed without recreating the wheel. The platform team offers GitOps build and deployment tool for Kubernetes workloads, which allowed the team to build the continuous delivery pipeline with all the bells and whistles in a matter of hours. By maintaining consistent Kubernetes configurations and integrations across major public clouds and internal cloud/edge environments, the Platform team offers a solution that abstracts and deploys workloads seamlessly to the private cloud and multiple public cloud providers.
My post will be incomplete if I don’t mention the Walmart culture. I loved working with all the intelligent and helpful people around me and enjoyed the support that I received from my team members. In a short span, we bonded as teammates and developed a sense of camaraderie. However, our closeness was not an effect of our circumstances but our shared dedication and passion. We drove ourselves to overcome several obstacles, regardless of the time and effort required. My leaders at Walmart continuously inspired us to challenge the status quo and find the best and optimal way to solve the problem. Without their support, we would not have made as much progress in our journey. I am proud to work with the team wherein everyone is highly supportive, and team collaboration can’t be any better. Everyone on the team works together, which makes sum of the parts greater than the whole.
Lastly, it’s very gratifying to relate and apply all the software engineering concepts such as availability, scalability, resiliency, and maintainability in my day-to-day work at Walmart. I deal with many challenging problems every day, which keep me going and push me to thrive for the best solution. After one fantastic year, the slogan “Save Money, Live better” is ingrained in me more than ever. Every day, I dedicate myself to providing customers the most effortless shopping experience possible — because if even one moment of their day can be improved, Walmart will strive to do so.
