Mariana Pop
Bentonville
Summary
Technology leader with 18+ years of experience across enterprise software engineering, data platforms, cloud modernization, machine learning, and AI-enabled automation at Walmart and Sam’s Club. Proven track record leading large engineering teams, modernizing legacy systems, improving operational efficiency, and delivering scalable platforms across Supply Chain and HR technology domains. Experienced in driving enterprise transformation through cloud migration, API modernization, data platform strategy, AI/ML adoption, operational readiness, and cross-functional executive alignment.
Overview
20
20
years of professional experience
Work History
Director of Software Engineering
Walmart
Bentonville, AR
04.2025 - Current
- Lead enterprise engineering strategy and execution across Core HR platforms, HR data modernization, Workday integrations, Unified Search, onboarding/preboarding experiences, and AI-enabled service automation.
- Directed collaborative efforts among engineering teams, senior management, TPMs, product partners, and business stakeholders to enhance reliability, operational efficiency, cost optimization, and associate experience.
- Led comprehensive migration efforts for priority HR data flows, integrations, APIs, search capabilities, and reporting patterns from legacy systems to modern platforms, ensuring seamless transition to CDA, core APIs, BigQuery, Hudi, Kafka, Workday, and cloud-native services.
- Facilitated operational support strategy for business-critical HR technology platforms to enhance efficiency.
- Advance AI and agentic automation use cases, including ServiceNow ticket classification, on-call resolution support, RAG-based knowledge retrieval, metadata reconciliation, root-cause analysis, and self-service API onboarding.
- Improve engineering operating discipline through CI/CD maturity, monitoring, validation frameworks, incident reduction, runbooks, support ownership, and operational health tracking.
- Converted intricate technical programs into executive-ready documents to facilitate strategic decision-making and enhance leadership communication.
- Mentored senior managers, architects, and engineering teams to cultivate a culture of ownership, accountability, and disciplined technical execution.
Senior Manager II Technology
Sam's Club, Walmart Inc.
Bentonville, AR
09.2019 - Current
- Lead over 30+ Data and ML engineers across Sam's Supply Chain Technology area in developing and implementing large - scale projects, introduced new systems, tools, and processes to achieve challenging objectives.
- Successfully managed and implemented a multi cloud robust data ingestion platform to integrate and process data from Supply Chain sources.
- Successfully lead and released collaborative platform supporting Integrated Planning and S&OP for Sam's Supply Chain
- Enhanced Operational Efficiency by leveraging the platform to streamline data workflows, resulting in a 20% increase in operational efficiency through improved data accuracy and processing speed.
- Provide expertise on mathematical concepts and inspire the adoption of advanced analytics and machine learning across Sam's Supply Chain department.
- Provided strong leadership to enhance team productivity and morale
- Implemented and developed operational standards, policies and procedures for data and ML engineers.
- Aggressively acquired and trained over 18 new talent, mentored data and ML engineers talent, fostering culture of continuous learning and innovation.
- Conducted performance evaluations, compensations and hiring to maintain appropriate staffing requirements.
Senior Manager, Business Intelligence
Sam's Club, Walmart Inc.
Bentonville, AR
09.2018 - 09.2019
- Collaborated with multiple business stakeholders to develop and drive strategy for End To End Supply Chain visibility.
- Developed and communicated goals, strategies, tactics, project plans, timelines, and key performance metrics to reach company goals.
- Created and managed supporting and related business intelligence processes for Sam's Supply Chain network by improving business decision making process by 28%.
- Worked collaboratively with management to develop strategy and approach to defining business challenges to be answered by data science.
- Performed hands-on analysis of large volumes of analytics, transaction, member's data, second and third party data. Worked with complex data structure, manipulated, cleansed data and performed statistical analysis.
Staff Software Engineer
Walmart Labs
Bentonville, AR
04.2016 - 08.2018
- Designed scalable architectures to support increasing user traffic and maintain system stability.
- Worked with project managers, data engineers and data scientist to implement and optimize scalability of various predictive models.
- Build predictive models using various machine learning tools to increase replenishment forecasting by 280 BP
- Promoted technical leadership to entry-level and junior engineers in complex enterprise system environment.
- Led software development initiative as subject matter expert in quantitative analysis for Supply Chain area.
- Introduced and implemented causality matrix feature for predictive modeling .
Programmer - Senior Software Engineer
Walmart Labs
Bentonville, AR
09.2006 - 04.2016
- Gained system expertise in Store System department by contributing to codebase used in software deployment for Item file, Price Change and Inventory Management.
- Participated in architecture, design and implementation of back end systems using C, Cobol, Perl and C++.
- Worked with software development and testing team members to design and develop robust solutions for CMI and Finance department to meet client requirements for functionality, scalability, and performance.
- Developed and integrated next generation platform for Internal Audit which increased stakeholder productivity by 45%.
- Worked with cross-functional design teams to create software solutions that improved overall functionality and performance.
- Performed code refactoring and optimization to improve overall performance.
- Created proofs of concept for innovative new solutions.
Education
Master of Science - Computational And Applied Mathematics
Penn State Behrend College
Erie, PA05-2008
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
Edinboro, PA05-2006
Bachelor of Arts - Mathematics
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
Edinboro, PA05-2006
Skills
- Enterprise Software Engineering Leadership
- Data Science, Machine Learning & Advanced Analytics
- Legacy Modernization & Platform Transformation
- Cloud, Data & API Strategy
- AI and Automation Leadership
- HR and Supply Chain Technology Platforms
- Operational Excellence & Production Readiness
- Platform Reliability, Observability & Incident Reduction
- Cross-Functional Executive Alignment
- Talent Development & Leadership Coaching
Accomplishments
- Leadership Excellence Recognition — Recognized for building, mentoring, and leading high-performing engineering teams while driving complex technology initiatives across Sam’s Club.
- "Walmart Associate of the Quarter " ( 2012,2014,2015)
- Patent holder: Co-inventor on US Patent 10,740,773 B2 for multi-model demand forecasting methods used to improve customer demand prediction for retail facilities.
Affiliations
NWA Data Science Community - https://betterorg.io/
Wyzant Tutor Community - https://www.wyzant.com/Tutors/AR/Bentonville/7679644/
Timeline
Director of Software Engineering
Walmart
04.2025 - Current
Senior Manager II Technology
Sam's Club, Walmart Inc.
09.2019 - Current
Senior Manager, Business Intelligence
Sam's Club, Walmart Inc.
09.2018 - 09.2019
Staff Software Engineer
Walmart Labs
04.2016 - 08.2018
Programmer - Senior Software Engineer
Walmart Labs
09.2006 - 04.2016
Bachelor of Arts - Mathematics
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
Master of Science - Computational And Applied Mathematics
Penn State Behrend College
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