Walmart announced a big push Tuesday to expand its Global Tech team by more than 5,000 employees, with nearly 200 of those jobs planned for Seattle, where the retailer established a tech presence last year.
The new positions in Seattle will primarily be data scientists and software engineers according to a career page list of current openings. Walmart currently has about 160 tech associates in the area and relies on a hybrid work model that is primarily virtual.
Additionally, Walmart has 14 stores in the Seattle metro area and 66 across Washington state.
Walmart is hiring right in the backyard of rival Amazon, which is based in Seattle and last year surpassed Walmart as the largest retail seller outside China.
Beyond Seattle, Walmart plans to open new tech hubs in Toronto, where it will place several hundred new jobs over the next 12 months, and Atlanta, where the first hiring phase will include 140 full-time tech roles. Walmart will now have 16 tech hubs and employ 20,000 people on its Global Tech team. Its total headcount is 2.3 million.
Walmart EVP and CTO Suresh Kumar said in the company’s blog post that early adoption of technology helped make Walmart “one of the world’s best success stories,” evolving beyond how it made Universal Product Codes (UPCs) the standard in retail and developed a sophisticated supply chain.
“Today, Walmart Global Tech develops and manages the foundational technologies on which customer experiences are built, including cloud, data, enterprise architecture, DevOps, infrastructure and security,” Kumar said.
