Senior Software Engineer - Storage Infrastructure

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through a portfolio of iconic products. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will design and optimize the foundational storage layer powering a massive dataset, ensuring efficient data access and high availability for APIs serving millions of requests per second.

Responsibilities:

• Design and optimize Cloud Spanner schemas for efficient profile storage, query patterns, and write throughput at 2.5B+ profile scale
• Implement Valkey (Redis-compatible) caching strategies achieving sub-10ms read latency for hot data access patterns
• Build multi-region Spanner replication and automated failover mechanisms ensuring 99.99% availability and disaster recovery
• Optimize Spanner read/write throughput, reduce hot-spotting, and improve query performance through index design and query optimization
• Implement comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems tracking storage health, latency percentiles (p50, p95, p99), capacity utilization, and cost
• Collaborate with API team on efficient data access patterns, query optimization, and caching strategies for activation endpoints
• Partner with Ingestion team on high-throughput write patterns, batch loading strategies, and schema evolution without downtime
• Design backup, point-in-time recovery, and disaster recovery procedures for critical user profile data
• Troubleshoot production storage issues including performance degradation, hot-spotting, lock contention, and capacity constraints
• Work with SRE teams on capacity planning, autoscaling strategies, cost optimization, and infrastructure efficiency
• Implement cache invalidation strategies, cache warming, and distributed caching patterns for consistent data access
• Create comprehensive documentation for storage architecture, operational runbooks, disaster recovery procedures, and on-call playbooks

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field
• 5+ years software engineering experience building production systems
• 3+ years hands-on experience with distributed databases or large-scale storage systems
• 2+ years with GCP infrastructure (Spanner, Memorystore, Cloud Monitoring) or AWS equivalents (DynamoDB, ElastiCache)
• Strong proficiency in Java, Go, or Python for infrastructure and database tooling development
• Hands-on experience with Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, TiDB, or other distributed SQL databases
• Experience with Redis, Valkey, Memcached, or other distributed caching systems in production
• Deep understanding of distributed systems: consistency models (strong vs. eventual), replication strategies, consensus algorithms (Paxos, Raft)
• SQL optimization skills and database schema design expertise including indexing strategies, partitioning, and query tuning
• Familiarity with database performance tuning: profiling slow queries, analyzing execution plans, optimizing hot-spotting
• Strong performance tuning and troubleshooting abilities in distributed database environments
• Demonstrated ability delivering reliable infrastructure solutions on schedule with minimal guidance
• Excellent collaboration with infrastructure, application, and SRE teams
• Team-level impact with ability to influence technical decisions within immediate team
• Understanding of data durability, consistency guarantees, and operational excellence
• Experience with multi-region Cloud Spanner deployments at petabyte scale
• Knowledge of cache invalidation strategies, cache coherence protocols, and distributed caching patterns
• Prior experience in large-scale user data platforms, identity systems, or adtech storage infrastructure
• Familiarity with database migration tools (gh-ost, pt-online-schema-change) and zero-downtime schema evolution
• Understanding of data partitioning strategies, sharding, horizontal scaling, and distributed transaction processing
• Experience with database backup and recovery tools, point-in-time recovery, and disaster recovery testing
• Contributions to database or distributed systems open-source projects (Spanner clients, Redis modules, CockroachDB)
• Self-driven, detail-oriented, excellent multitasking abilities in fast-paced environments