Walmart plans on hiring 5,000 technologists this year for its Global Tech team, in addition to building out tech hubs in Toronto and Atlanta.
The 5,000 new hires would represent a significant expansion for Global Tech, which currently employs 20,000 people. According to a corporate blog post, the company is particularly interested in hiring “cybersecurity professionals, architects, developers, software engineers, data scientists, data engineers, technical program managers and product managers.”
The Toronto and Atlanta facilities will join 15 other Global Tech hubs around the world, including ones in Dallas, Charlotte, Portland, and Silicon Valley. So Walmart is clearly expanding its tech footprint; how much is it willing to pay for top talent?
Levels.fyi, which crowdsources software engineer salaries at various companies, gives us a clue. Here’s the latest data for Walmart Global Tech; although crowdsourcing isn’t always the most scientific means of gathering data, the ranges presented on levels.fyi often align well with other sources, such as Glassdoor.
How do Walmart Global Tech’s software engineer salaries match up against those at Amazon, arguably Walmart’s biggest rival? At first glance, it seems like Amazon leads when it comes to compensation:
However, it’s important to note that levels.fyi is probably providing us with an incomplete picture. Companies everywhere are paying technologists handsomely for highly specialized skills, such as cybersecurity and data science; chances are good that Walmart and Amazon are paying at least some specialists a good deal more than the numbers represented here.
Like Walmart, Amazon is also in the midst of a technologist hiring surge, with plans to onboard 55,000 technologists and corporate employees over the next several months. Based on data from Emsi Burning Glass, which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country, Amazon is particularly interested in technologists skilled in software development, Java, Amazon Web Services (AWS), C++ and Python (among other tech skills).
Both Walmart and Amazon need the best technologists to fulfill their respective commerce ambitions. It seems likely their current hiring surges won’t be their last.
