Sr. Backend Data Engineer - Streaming Data Platform, Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo is the ultimate consumer inbox with hundreds of millions of users. The company is seeking a Senior Backend Data Engineer to design and develop robust, highly scalable streaming systems and infrastructure on public cloud platforms, while collaborating with cross-functional teams to support AI-driven product needs.

Responsibilities:

• Design and develop robust, highly scalable streaming systems and infrastructure on public cloud platforms (GCP)
• Identify and implement AI-driven efficiencies in day-to-day engineering work, utilizing AI pair-programming tools to accelerate development cycles and improve code quality
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to support AI-driven product needs, including Mail Classification, Entity Extraction, and Summarization
• Optimize streaming workflows by replacing manual monitoring or repetitive diagnostic tasks with automated, AI-assisted observability and alerting systems
• Lead end-to-end feature development within a cross-functional team, ensuring solutions are both scalable and resilient
• Exercise judgment in when to rely on AI-assisted code generation versus manual architectural design to ensure system reliability at Yahoo scale
• Contribute to a culture of continuous learning through active participation in design discussions and code reviews

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 6+ years of professional experience in software systems development, with 3+ years specifically in streaming platforms (GCP, Dataflow, Flink, Kafka)
• Demonstrated expertise in Java and high-throughput messaging technologies
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Copilot, Cursor) to level up thinking, design process, and coding speed
• Familiarity with AI/ML deployment workflows and the data infrastructure required to support LLM-based features
• Solid understanding of DevOps principles (CI/CD, Terraform, Kubernetes)
• Comfort operating in an evolving, AI-augmented environment with a focus on using automation to increase individual and team impact
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) at enterprise scale
• Deep knowledge of real-time data governance and AI-generated output validation
• Experience with Pub/Sub, Kinesis, SQS or other relative technologies
• Interest in prompt engineering for automating technical documentation and system architecture mapping