Career In Tech

Promoted to Be A Senior Data Scientist at Walmart

5 key takeaways to boost your tech career

Leihua Ye, PhD
6 min readJun 5, 2023

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Career In Tech Promoted to Be A Senior Data Scientist at Walmart 5 key takeaways to boost your tech career
Photo by Liana Mikah on Unsplash

Introduction

If you have followed me for a while, you probably know I started out as a Data Scientist at Walmart Global Tech, the technology branch of the Fortune 1 company. It was my first industry job out of academia. Like everyone else who began a new career chapter, I found myself clueless and anxiously pondering how a tech career would progress.

Fast forward to today, I was recently promoted to a Senior Data Scientist, leading multiple end-to-end deliverables. Looking back at the journey, I feel grateful for every learning opportunity and how much I have progressed in my career (more than just a promotion).

The main motivation for today’s post is to share the learnings and growth with the wider community as a tech insider. There are a lot of open secrets that only insiders know, and here is one: you will be promoted to the next level only when you have performed at the next level for an extended amount of time. I didn’t know we had to perform at the next level before getting a promotion! This is an eye-opening moment for me. After some reflection, here are five high-level learnings I want to share with everyone who is early in their career:

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Leihua Ye, PhD

Senior Data Scientist @ Walmart; PhD @ University of California. Data Science | A/B Test & Causal Inference | Career www.linkedin.com/in/leihuaye