Principal Engineer

It takes powerful technology to connect our brands and partners with an audience of hundreds of millions of people. Whether you’re looking to write mobile app code, engineer the servers behind our massive ad tech stacks, or develop algorithms to help us process trillions of data points a day, what you do here will have a huge impact on our business—and the world.

A Little About Us

We are a high-impact team within the CTO organization, dedicated to accelerating outcomes for internal development teams. We own the entire CI/CD and artifact ecosystem, leading the platform work, automation, governance, and long-term service ownership. Our mission is centered on critical platform modernization and moving to a product-first operating model that emphasizes clear "golden paths," measurable Developer Experience (DX) outcomes, and continuous evolution. To achieve this, we champion a high-ownership culture with strong engineering fundamentals (reliability, observability, testing), drive an AI/agentic automation strategy to reduce toil at scale, and define governance in partnership with Security to ensure developer velocity.

A Lot About You

We’re hiring a Principal Developer Experience Engineer to lead the modernization of the CI/CD portion of our internal developer platform. The immediate focus is a high-scale migration: moving ~30,000 pipelines to GitHub Actions, with a target of 100% migration by end of year and ensuring that all new repos/apps start on GitHub Actions by default.

This is an engineering-first role where you will  build the “paved road” for CI/CD by defining governance, templates, reusable workflows, and operational best practices. Most deliverables will be shipped as code and automation - including agentic AI systems that generate, migrate, validate, and maintain CI/CD configurations at scale.

What you’ll do

Build and operate an agentic migration system to GitHub Actions

• Design an agentic AI automation that can translate and migrate pipelines to GitHub Actions workflows

• Automate PR creation and iteration

• Build “safe at scale” operations: migration batching, progress tracking, exception queues, rollback strategies, and clear ownership boundaries.

• Establish evaluation/quality loops for the agent: regression tests, correctness checks, policy checks, and measurable success criteria (not just “it looks right”).

 Establish GitHub Actions governance + the CI/CD paved road

• Define governance for GitHub Actions at enterprise/org scale

• Build and maintain reusable workflows

Define Artifactory best practices and standard integrations

• Establish best practices for Artifactory repository structure and operations

• Standardize how CI publishes and consumes artifacts with secure defaults and consistent metadata

• Maintain conventions that scale (including repository naming/constraints and guardrails)

Runner strategy (GitHub-hosted + self-hosted) and enterprise enablement

• Define when to use GitHub-hosted vs self-hosted runners and document the default paths

• Help design runner governance and access boundaries using runner groups (runner groups create a security boundary and control access)

• Partner with infra/security where ownership sits elsewhere, but be accountable for the end-to-end developer experience

Drive adoption and outcomes (internal enablement, not public-facing)

• Enable app teams through office hours, migration support, design-partner engagements, and iterative improvements to reduce friction

• Treat CI/CD as a product: measure adoption, reliability, and developer satisfaction - and iterate based on data

What success looks like

• 100% of Screwdriver pipelines migrated to GitHub Actions by end of year, with transparent burn-down tracking and a stable landing zone

• All new repos/apps start on GitHub Actions using approved templates and reusable workflows

• Clearly defined governance for allowed actions/workflows, plus scalable guardrails and upgrade paths

• Consistent Artifactory usage for containers + npm (publish/consume patterns, permissions, retention), reducing break/fix and “tribal knowledge”

• Tangible DX improvements: faster time-to-green, fewer flaky failures, fewer support tickets, and predictable CI costs

Minimum qualifications

• Practical experience building LLM/agentic AI systems where correctness, guardrails, and evaluation matter (not just ad-hoc prompting)

• Senior-level experience building production-quality systems, platform tooling, or internal developer platforms

• Deep CI/CD expertise: pipeline design, troubleshooting, reliability improvements, and rollout/migration planning

• Hands-on GitHub Actions experience including reusable workflows and enterprise/org governance considerations

• Experience with artifact repositories and release flows; JFrog Artifactory strongly preferred

• Strong written communication for internal docs, templates, and playbooks

• Bachelors degree or equivalent work experience

Preferred qualifications

• Experience migrating at scale between CI systems (GHA/Jenkins/GitLab CI/Circle/etc.)

• Experience building automation that interacts with GitHub at scale (repo scanning, PR bots, policy validators)

• Security-minded CI/CD experience (pinning actions, least-privilege defaults, secrets hygiene, runner boundaries) in partnership with security

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 $143,625.00 - $299,375.00/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.