Senior Software Developer Engineer

Yahoo Mail is the ultimate consumer inbox with hundreds of millions of users. It’s the best way to access your email and stay organized from a computer, phone or tablet. With its beautiful design and lightning fast speed, Yahoo Mail makes reading, organizing, and sending emails easier than ever.

A Little About Us

Yahoo Mail AntiSpam and Delivery Engineering powers the core intelligence and transmission infrastructure for over 220 million active users worldwide.

• AntiSpam Engineering builds high-throughput, real-time protection systems that shield users from spam, phishing, fraud, and abuse using advanced machine learning algorithms and agentic AI detection.

• Delivery Engineering manages high-performing, resilient distributed systems that deliver billions of outbound and inbound messages daily across web services, email RFCs, and global networking layers.

We operate at a massive scale—handling billions of daily connections and managing petabytes of storage. As we modernize our stack toward cloud-native architecture (GCP), we are actively embedding agentic AI and AI-assisted workflows into our daily engineering culture.

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer (IC4) on the AntiSpam and Delivery team, you will drive technical solutions across high-volume spam detection, entity reputation, traffic shaping, and email delivery pipelines.

At IC4, you are expected to operate with autonomy—translating ambiguous requirements into resilient architectures, performing root-cause analysis on critical systems, making key design decisions, and elevating team productivity through technical leadership and AI-assisted engineering practices. Your scope directly impacts your squad and the reliability of Yahoo Mail's infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and maintain high-concurrency, distributed microservices in Java and Go that meet stringent SLA, reliability, and security constraints.

• Champion AI-assisted engineering practices on the team, leveraging tools like Claude, GitHub Copilot and Cursor to accelerate feature implementation, code refactoring, and automated test suite creation.

• Integrate agentic AI workflows and LLM capabilities to enhance real-time spam detection models, abuse pattern recognition, and automated root-cause diagnostics.

• Lead technical initiatives across the squad, driving architecture reviews, code quality standards, and continuous deployment to production.

• Automate infrastructure provisioning, scaling, CI/CD pipelines, and telemetry monitoring across cloud-native (GCP) and hybrid environments.

• Evaluate emerging AI engineering tools and agentic frameworks, recommending safe, effective ways to modernize engineering workflows and eliminate repetitive manual tasks.

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a strong culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, and collaborative problem-solving.

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software development experience with strong fluency in Java, Go, or C++ (depth in Java is strongly preferred).

• 2+ years of experience designing, owning, and operating components of large-scale distributed server applications in production.

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

• Hands-on proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor) to accelerate coding, debugging, and system optimization.

• Strong computer science fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, operating systems, and distributed networking.

• Proven experience building and deploying cloud-native applications (preferably in GCP or AWS) with CI/CD automation.

• Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives, guide architectural choices, and mentor engineering peers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Operational experience managing high-throughput, fault-tolerant distributed systems under strict low-latency requirements.

• Experience with prompt engineering, agentic AI frameworks, or integrating LLM APIs into production pipelines and developer tools.

• Experience with big data and stream processing technologies (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, HBase).

• Background in anti-spam, anti-abuse, text classification, or anomaly detection systems will be a plus.

• Working knowledge of scripting languages (e.g., Python) for data analysis and pipeline automation.

• Proactive mindset toward experimenting with modern AI workflows and advocating for continuous developer workflow enhancements

The material job duties and responsibilities of this role include those listed above as well as adhering to Yahoo policies; exercising sound judgment; working effectively, safely and inclusively with others; exhibiting trustworthiness and meeting expectations; and safeguarding business operations and brand integrity.

At Yahoo, we offer flexible hybrid work options that our employees love! While most roles don’t require regular office attendance, you may occasionally be asked to attend in-person events or team sessions. You’ll always get notice to make arrangements. Your recruiter will let you know if a specific job requires regular attendance at a Yahoo office or facility. If you have any questions about how this applies to the role, just ask the recruiter!

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.

We believe that a diverse and inclusive workplace strengthens Yahoo and deepens our relationships. When you support everyone to be their best selves, they spark discovery, innovation and creativity. Among other efforts, our 11 employee resource groups (ERGs) enhance a culture of belonging with programs, events and fellowship that help educate, support and create a workplace where all feel welcome.

The compensation for this position ranges from $128,250.00 - $266,875.00/yr and will vary depending on factors such as your location, skills and experience.The compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of discretionary annual bonus or commissions. Our comprehensive benefits include healthcare, a great 401k, backup childcare, education stipends and much (much) more.

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