Principal Backend Engineer, Yahoo Mail

A Little About Us: 

We build, enhance, and maintain one of the highest-scaling email platforms on the planet - impacting approximately 300 million users every month and serving billions of requests a day across servers around the world.

The Core Mail Team encompasses the full breadth of Yahoo Mail's backend. Our Services group owns the middle tier that contains the APIs and business logic through which virtually all mail operations flow - REST APIs for our world-class mail clients (mobile, web, and beyond), standards-based protocols (IMAP, POP) for generic mail clients, industry-leading backend mail synchronization, Calendar, Contacts, and other foundational services in the Yahoo communication suite. We are actively driving significant modernization efforts to re-platform and scale these services for the future.

Our Data group builds and operates the data platform that powers it all - the services and infrastructure responsible for storing and serving message metadata, message bodies, and attachments, as well as large-scale data migration and mailbox metadata systems, all on top of GCP (Spanner, GCS, GKE). This team designs and runs highly available distributed systems, maintains production readiness and BCP for multi-region deployments, and evolves schemas and data models at multi-petabyte scale.

Together, we are critical to Yahoo's success - running highly scalable applications across private and public clouds that we are actively transforming to 100% native cloud. Our Services and Data groups collaborate closely with each other, Product, Infrastructure teams, and the broader Mail organization to deliver reliable, low-latency experiences for every user.

Come join this amazing team of Engineers, Product Managers and Designers to work on next generation innovative experiences transforming how users connect with each other every day! 

Responsibilities: 

• Design, implement, test, and debug features in mail supporting client features; revise and refine as required

• Provide technical leadership on high-impact projects

• Influence and coach a distributed team of engineers

• Request and participate in code reviews 

• Participate in agile development with weekly sprints, planning & estimating work, daily standup, & retrospectives 

• Learn from a multitude of sources, including on the job project experience, reviewing code from others, team education sessions, collaborating with peers, frequently soliciting advice & shoulder reviews from leaders & architects, as well as online or class-based learning 

• Take initiative to identify, solve, and pursue problems you discover to full completion 

• Contribute to best practices and work culture of our team 

• Drive the adoption and development of AI solutions to enhance system reliability and developer productivity.

• Stay current with evolving AI-assisted development tools and help define best practices for AI-assisted development.

• Promote and solicit ideas within project teams 

A Lot About You: 

You enjoy solving problems within a collaborative team. You have an interest in the full life-cycle of a product - designing, coding, testing, reviewing, launching, and troubleshooting. You will have the opportunity to participate in projects with significant impact on the success of Yahoo.

• Experience in OOP. Java or C++ preferred

• Experience in cloud native application development and architecture preferably in GCP or AWS

• Strong understanding of the fundamentals including Data Structures, Algorithms, OS and Networking

• Experience with development on Unix (Linux) platform

• Experience with implementing AI solutions to improve developer productivity and efficiency

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience 

• 3+ years of experience leading teams by designing, building scalable high-performing distributed systems

• Proven expertise in the seamless integration of AI-driven coding agents and AI teams within existing development workflows, with an emphasis on enhancing debugging efficiency, accelerating code refactoring initiatives, optimizing code development cycles, and supporting strategic architectural exploration

• BS/MS in Computer Science or related field 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• REST API (with Jersey and/or Servlets 3.0)

• Multi-threaded programming and/or understanding contention issues

• Large-scale, large user base development

• Web-scale or enterprise-scale development

Important notes for your attention

Applications: 

All applicants must apply for Yahoo openings direct with Yahoo.  We do not authorize any external agencies in India to handle candidates’ applications.   No agency nor individual may charge candidates for any efforts they make on an applicant’s behalf in the hiring process.  

Our internal recruiters will reach out to you directly to discuss the next steps if we determine that the role is a good fit for you.  Selected candidates will go through formal interviews and assessments arranged by Yahoo direct.  

Offer Distributions: 

Our electronic offer letter and documents will be issued through our system for e-signatures, not via individual emails.

Yahoo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, and will not be discriminated against based on age, race, gender, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or any other protected category. Yahoo will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law. Yahoo is dedicated to providing an accessible environment for all candidates during the application process and for employees during their employment. If you need accessibility assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability, please submit a request via the Accommodation Request Form (www.yahooinc.com/careers/contact-us.html) or call +1.866.772.3182. Requests and calls received for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

Yahoo has a high degree of flexibility around employee location and hybrid working. In fact, our flexible-hybrid approach to work is one of the things our employees rave about. Most roles don’t require specific regular patterns of in-person office attendance. If you join Yahoo, you may be asked to attend (or travel to attend) on-site work sessions, team-building, or other in-person events. When these occur, you’ll be given notice to make arrangements. 

If you’re curious about how this factors into this role, please discuss with the recruiter.

Currently work for Yahoo? Please apply on our internal career site.