My Internship Experience at Walmart Labs

Back in 2019, when I gave thought to what kind of role I want to work in, the thought that came to my mind was “large scale impact”. Fast forward to 2020 summers, this thought became a reality and I got the wonderful opportunity to work with the Personalization team at Walmart Labs. There couldn’t have been a better opportunity to work in an organisation which directly impacts customers at such a large scale with 11,500 stores under 56 banners in 27 countries and eCommerce websites in 10 countries.

Personally, it has been a one-of-its kind experience where I saw the scale at which the organisation works. In the beginning I was a bit nervous as I wasn’t sure how the work-from-home setup would workout since I was new to it. But, the seamless onboarding process made it much easier and made me feel more comfortable. The first day gave an insight into the past, present and the future of the company, the recent initiatives being taken and the goals. One thing I saw in common among all these was the priority given to customers. Each and every feature that was being shared showed that the customer is always the priority. Something that fascinated me the most. Within the first week, we were trained to use different development tools irrespective of the teams we were part of, a hands-on activity which increased my understanding of how such a large codebase is handled by the organisation.

During the two months I was a part of the Personalization team. This team works towards giving a personalised experience to each and every user. My task as a part of the team was to assist in the migration of the database to cloud platforms from the private cluster. Firstly, as I was a bit new to this domain, I watched a lot of YouTube videos and courses to understand what exactly is the underlying process for migrating the data. Through this, I was able to understand what the exact workflow of the task is. I was very surprised at how interns are treated equally when I was given access to the actual data used by the organisation. I was allowed to explore the real dataset on my own. I got to work hands-on on the various tech stacks used to fulfil this goal including Hive, Spark, Scala and Shell scripting.

One disheartening part was the fact that I could not work onsite due to the Covid-19 situation and the lockdown. The people I got to interact with were so amazing, it would have been even better if it was face to face. The work environment was extremely friendly and supportive. Despite the lockdown situation, everyone made sure we got a similar experience as it would have been onsite. There were numerous webinars where we were introduced to the work culture of the teams and the passion with which everyone worked. Everyone had their own hobbies along with their work at Walmart and this was the most mind blowing part. I too got to pursue my hobbies along with working for the internship.

Being a Bangalorean, I crossed the road where the office is many times. Here is one picture I took in November 2019 while passing by. :)

I had an amazing time working at Walmart Labs, filled with engaging events and learning opportunities. A big thank you to Walmart for the great experience!

Cheers!

Hi there! Thank you so much for giving this blog a read. You can reach out to me via mail (miloni.mittal@gmail.com) for any queries or for a small chit-chat. :)