Position Summary...
The Director AI Security & Safety Engineering is responsible for leading the organization that secures Walmart's generative AI systems, large language model (LLM) platforms, and agentic AI infrastructure. As AI becomes increasingly embedded across Walmart's technology landscape, this role defines and executes the strategy to integrate security and safety principles throughout the entire AI lifecyclefrom model design and development to deployment, runtime enforcement, and governance.
This leader manages a growing team of engineers (IC3IC6) and partners closely with engineering, platform, governance, legal, and product teams. The role blends deep technical leadership with people and organizational leadership, ensuring AI platforms are secure by default and aligned with global regulatory and risk management frameworks.
What you'll do...
About Team:
As Walmart's Information Security (InfoSec) team, we're responsible for securing our digital ecosystem, minimizing risk across the enterprise, and defending against cyberthreats. In an ever-changing digital landscape, it is vital to keep pace with cyberthreats and understand how they relate to Walmart. Information is the most expensive and fastest-growing target for cybercriminals; however, stealing data is not a cybercriminal's only motive. Whether an attack is for political, financial or hacktivist purposes, the result is the same: compromised or lost data. Our goal is to keep the data of Walmart's business, associates, and customers secure.
What you'll do:
Organizational & People Leadership
- Build, scale, and mentor a high-performing AI Security & Safety Engineering organization (1520 engineers)
- Develop technical leaders and cultivate a culture of operational excellence, inclusion, and continuous learning
- Establish clear ownership models, execution cadences, and postmortem-driven improvement practices
AI Security & Safety Strategy
- Define and execute the AI safety engineering roadmap, including:
Prompt filtering and response validation
Hallucination detection and mitigation
Agent action gating and autonomy controls
Automated red-teaming and adversarial testing
- Champion secure-by-default and safety-by-design patterns across MLOps, LLMOps, and agent deployment workflows
Engineering Execution & Architecture
- Oversee implementation of scalable AI security controls, including CI/CD integrations, runtime telemetry, and incident response workflows
- Guide architectural decisions in partnership with Distinguished Engineers and Principal ICs
- Lead AI-specific threat modeling exercises and define incident response playbooks for AI-related failures
Governance, Risk, and Compliance
- Partner with Governance and Legal teams to align with frameworks such as the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, and ISO/IEC 42001
- Define and track organizational metrics including hallucination acceptance probability (HAP), red-team remediation SLAs, and model audit readiness
- Represent the AI Security organization in executive reviews, safety councils, audits, and external risk forums
What you'll bring:
Leadership & Experience
- 15+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure, InfoSec, or AI/ML leadership roles
- 5+ years of experience managing engineers and senior technical leaders (IC4+)
- Proven ability to lead cross-organizational risk mitigation programs across engineering, security, legal, and governance teams
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to translate complex technical risks into executive-level insights
AI Platform & Cloud Expertise
- Strong familiarity with cloud-based AI platforms and services, including Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex AI, and foundational AI services
- Experience embedding security and safety controls into large-scale, production AI systems
Core AI Security & Safety Expertise (Required)
- Deep understanding of AI- and LLM-specific threat models, including prompt injection (direct and indirect), jailbreaks, hallucination, data poisoning, model leakage, misuse, and over-reliance on probabilistic outputs
- Working knowledge of the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications and the OWASP GenAI Security Project, including common failure modes such as insecure output handling, model denial-of-service, and training data poisoning
- Familiarity with MITRE ATLAS and adversarial tactics including model evasion, extraction, poisoning, abuse of autonomy, and adversarial probing
- Experience designing or operating runtime AI safety controls such as input/output validation, content moderation, PII detection, response steering, and last-mile enforcement
- Understanding of distribution shift and out-of-distribution (OOD) risks and their impact on AI reliability, safety, and trust
- Awareness of reward hacking and objective misalignment, and how poorly specified incentives can result in unsafe emergent behavior
- Practical experience with AI red-teaming and adversarial testing, including converting findings into automated regression tests
- Strong understanding of agentic AI risks, including tool misuse, unintended action loops, escalation of autonomy, and the need for human-in-the-loop controls, sandboxing, and kill-switch mechanisms
- Familiarity with evolving AI regulatory and legal expectations, including high-risk AI classifications, auditability, and conformity assessment requirements
Nice to Have
- Experience implementing AI safety governance frameworks or Responsible AI programs
- Exposure to open-source AI security tools, policy engines (OPA/OPAL), or safety benchmarks such as SafetyBench and JailbreakBench
- Certifications or formal coursework in AI ethics, cybersecurity leadership, or machine learning compliance
- Experience with privacy-preserving machine learning, federated learning security, or advanced AI red-teaming techniques
Mission Scope
This role leads the execution of Walmart's LLM safety and security programs and serves as the engineering bridge between executive policy, regulatory obligations, and low-level technical enforcement across AI platforms.
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 experts 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 Work
Walmart's culture sets us apart, and we know being together helps us innovate, learn and grow great careers. This role is based in our Chennai office for daily work, with the flexibility for associates to manage their 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 isand feelsincluded, 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.
Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, information systems, cybersecurity, or related area and 6years experience in information security or related area at a technology, retail, or data-driven company.Option 2: 8 years experience in information security or related area at a technology, retail, or data-driven company.
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.
Certification in Security+, GISF, CISM, or CISA, Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Information Systems, Cybersecurity, or related area and 4 years experience leading information security or cybersecurity projects
CCNA - Cisco Certified Network Administrator - Certification, CISSP - Certified Information Systems Security Professional - Certification, GCIH - GIAC Certified Incident Handler - Certification
Primary Location...
TOWER 1, PART OF 1ST,2ND TO 4TH FLRS, SY NO. 141/14A, 200FT(RADIAL ROAD),ZAMIN PALLAVARAM, INTL TECH PARK, , India R-2400596
