Senior Software Engineer - Real-Time Ingestion

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. As a Senior Data Engineer on the Consumer Data Organization, you will design and implement streaming data pipelines that process billions of user signals daily, ensuring data freshness for downstream activation and monetization use cases worth hundreds of millions in annual revenue.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and optimize real-time streaming pipelines for third-party ID mutations, behavioral signals, and user event ingestion
• Build scalable Kafka-based data pipelines handling millions of events per second with exactly-once processing semantics
• Implement Apache Dataflow/Beam jobs for stream processing, enrichment, validation, and transformation of user signals
• Design comprehensive monitoring and data quality checks ensuring pipeline reliability, data freshness, and SLA compliance
• Collaborate with Storage team on efficient Cloud Spanner write patterns, schema design, and high-throughput mutation strategies
• Optimize pipeline performance to reduce lag, improve throughput, and minimize processing costs in GCP infrastructure
• Implement dead letter queues, retry logic, and error handling strategies ensuring data loss prevention
• Troubleshoot production data issues including pipeline failures, data quality problems, and performance degradation
• Work with Privacy team to ensure compliant data handling, PII protection, and sensitive data detection in real-time streams
• Create comprehensive documentation for pipeline architecture, operational runbooks, and on-call procedures
• Participate in on-call rotation supporting production streaming pipelines with 99.9% uptime SLA
• Partner with upstream data producers to ensure consistent event schemas and data quality

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, or related technical field
• 5+ years data engineering experience building production data systems
• 3+ years hands-on experience with real-time/streaming data processing systems at scale
• 2+ years with GCP (Dataflow, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Spanner, GCS) or AWS equivalents (Kinesis, EMR, DynamoDB)
• Strong proficiency in Python, Java, or Scala for data pipeline development
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, or other distributed messaging platforms
• Experience with Apache Beam, Apache Dataflow, or Apache Spark Streaming for stream processing
• Understanding of stream processing patterns: windowing, watermarks, exactly-once semantics, state management
• SQL proficiency and experience with distributed databases (Spanner, Cassandra, DynamoDB)
• Familiarity with data serialization formats: Avro, Protobuf, JSON, Parquet
• Strong problem-solving skills and operational excellence mindset in production environments
• Demonstrated ability delivering reliable data pipelines on schedule with minimal guidance
• Excellent collaboration across engineering, product, and infrastructure teams
• Team-level impact with ability to influence technical decisions within immediate team
• Understanding of data governance and privacy compliance (GDPR, CCPA) in data pipelines
• Experience with Cloud Spanner writes at high throughput (millions of writes per second)
• Knowledge of data governance frameworks, privacy compliance, and PII handling best practices
• Prior experience in adtech, identity platforms, or consumer data systems processing user behavioral data
• Familiarity with data quality frameworks: Great Expectations, Deequ, or custom validation systems
• Understanding of event-driven architectures, change data capture (CDC), and event sourcing patterns
• Experience with schema evolution, schema registries (Confluent Schema Registry, Apicurio)
• Contributions to open-source streaming projects (Kafka, Beam, Flink) or data engineering communities
• Self-driven, detail-oriented, excellent multitasking abilities in fast-paced environments