Walmart’s chief technology officer plans to step down

Jeremy King, Walmart Inc.’s chief technology officer, is leaving the company for “a new adventure,” the retailer said Wednesday. King’s last day there will be March 29.

Since joining Walmart in 2011, King has helped the Bentonville retailer overhaul its e-commerce business to better compete against Amazon.com and other rivals. At the recent SXSW technology conference in Austin, Texas, King said he wanted Walmart to be seen as a tech company as well as a retailer.

King led Walmart Labs, the retailer’s innovation arm, from its inception. It now has 7,500 employees working in Bentonville; San Bruno, Sunnyvale and Carlsbad, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Reston, Va.; Hoboken, N.J.; Dublin, Ireland; and Bangalore, India.

Walmart did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, a company memo released by CNBC said Walmart’s Fiona Tan, senior vice president of customer technology for Walmart Labs, will move into “an elevated role as liaison for technology and Walmart U.S. and U.S. e-commerce leadership” while the retailer searches for King’s replacement.

The memo said that during King’s first few years at Walmart, “he built out an engineering and product organization focused on reimagining the platform for our e-commerce engine. … The operational decisions made during that time were key to the success of our technology team and led to more agile ways of working, transparent toolsets, product-focused roadmaps and a robust patent program.”

According to the memo, King’s role grew over the past two years as Walmart Labs evolved from supporting the e-commerce platform to also taking new technologies to the retailer’s U.S. stores.

Walmart’s U.S. online sales grew 40 percent in the previous fiscal year, but the company does not detail the amount of those sales. The retailer also has introduced in-store innovations such as autonomous robots that scan shelves and clean floors, and additional application features that make store navigation and checkout faster and easier for shoppers.

Before joining Walmart, King worked for three years as executive vice president at LiveOps, and before that he was vice president of engineering and software development at eBay.