Senior Software Engineer

Yahoo is a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through their portfolio of iconic products. The Senior Software Engineer role focuses on improving Yahoo Search quality by leveraging machine learning and AI to enhance user experiences. This position involves collaborating with data scientists and ML engineers to productionize models and build scalable backend services.

Responsibilities:

• Partner closely with data scientists and ML engineers to productionize machine learning models, transforming research prototypes into scalable, reliable backend services
• Design, build, and operate high-throughput, low-latency APIs that power Guided Search experiences at large query-per-second (QPS) scale
• Own the end-to-end serving lifecycle for ML-powered systems, including model integration, feature retrieval, online inference, rollout, monitoring, and iteration
• Build and maintain robust data pipelines for training, validation, evaluation, and online serving, ensuring data quality, consistency, and freshness
• Define and uphold production-readiness standards, including scalability, reliability, observability, and fault tolerance
• Optimize systems for performance, cost efficiency, and operational excellence in a distributed, cloud-based environment
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, infrastructure, and platform teams to translate product requirements into backend architectures that can evolve over time
• Instrument services with meaningful metrics, logging, and alerting to support experimentation, A/B testing, and continuous improvement
• Contribute to technical design reviews, documentation, and engineering best practices, raising the overall technical bar of the team

Requirements:

• 4+ years of professional experience building large-scale, highly scalable backend systems
• Strong programming skills in C++ and Python, with experience writing production-quality code
• Experience designing and implementing backend APIs and services, including web or service-oriented architectures
• Hands-on experience with data pipelines and large-scale data processing, using technologies such as PySpark, Spark, or similar frameworks
• Experience integrating and productionizing machine learning models within backend systems
• Experience developing, deploying, and operating services in AWS environments
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience