Distinguished Optimization Data Scientist - Routing & Path Planning

at  Walmart Advanced Systems and Robotics

At Walmart Advanced Systems & Robotics, we’re building the infrastructure that will power the next generation of retail experiences. We’re the team behind Alphabot®, a new technology that’s changing the way America shops. Our automated pickup and delivery systems use a combination of robotics and software to efficiently handle large volumes of online orders, streamlining operations for managers and enhancing the customer experience. We’re passionate about technology, retail, and creating solutions that impact millions of customers daily.
We’re seeking a Distinguished Optimization Scientist to lead R&D of next-generation routing and path planning algorithms for our multi-robot grocery fulfillment system.
In this highly visible role, you will lead concept generation and feasibility, analysis, proof-of-concept demonstration, and simulation/laboratory validation of new approaches to multi-agent path planning. Our unique fleet of autonomous mobile robots move in three dimensions, and your algorithms will iteratively plan efficient routes, resolve conflicts, and demonstrate robustness to disturbances; all while meeting stringent real-time execution requirements.
You will work in cross-functional teams, representing the concerns of algorithm performance in next generation system design activities. Further, you will lead research activities for yourself and a team, patenting and publishing novel concepts, and participating in the academic research community.

SOME EXPERIENCE PREFERRED IN:

• Warehouse robotics or fulfillment operations
• Queueing theory, combinatorial optimization, resource allocation
• Software development best practices, such as unit testing and CICD
• Cloud-native environments (Azure, AWS, GCP, etc.)

• Propose formulations of multi-agent routing algorithms, with mathematical statements of feasibility, reachability and optimality.
• Mature algorithms toward deployment, incorporating system requirements, compute budgets, and system constraints.
• Ensure that your algorithms can scale to thousands of retail facilities, each with more than a hundred autonomous mobile robots.
• Demonstrate the performance of your technology in simulation studies.
• Produce design documents, mathematical formulations of algorithms, simulation artifacts and architectural descriptions of algorithms. Reducing algorithms to production code is outside the scope of this role.
• Recruit and lead a team of scientists, define their objectives, and integrate their output into a comprehensive path planning, trajectory generation and control architecture.