Senior 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.

As a Senior Principal Engineer at Yahoo!, you will be at the forefront of designing, implementing, and maintaining scalable and reliable services that power our exciting audience platform. Whether you’re enhancing data integration or developing advanced analytics solutions, your contributions will have a profound impact on our business and the way the world interacts with our brands.

A Little About Us:

The Yahoo! Consumer Data Team is developing a unified, cloud-native platform for all Yahoo user data. We simplify how teams access and utilize Yahoo first-party and third-party data while strengthening compliance. Our work empowers business units to enhance experimentation, monetization, marketing, and personalization with greater efficiency and reduced risk.

A Little About You:

The ideal candidate will have a proven track record in engineering roles, particularly in large organizations, with a strong ability to handle complex data challenges. They should be passionate about leveraging data to drive business outcomes and possess excellent collaboration skills to work effectively across teams.

As part of our Audience Platform, you'll play a key role in helping Yahoo leverage first-party and third-party data to build comprehensive audience solutions essential for experimentation, monetization, marketing, and personalization. This large-scale initiative offers you the chance to tackle significant technical challenges while making impactful contributions to how we responsibly utilize data assets across our ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities:

• Technical Leadership & Innovation: Design and architect sophisticated data pipeline solutions for Yahoo's Consumer Data Platform that effectively handle petabyte-scale user data across our cloud-native infrastructure, establishing a single, authoritative source for all user data across Yahoo properties.

• Strategic Partnership & Problem Solving: Collaborate across horizontal and vertical business units with data scientists, ML engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders to define technical approaches that directly enhance experimentation, monetization, marketing, and personalization initiatives.

• Ownership and Delivery: Demonstrate end-to-end ownership of complex distributed data systems from conception through production, making high-velocity, data-driven decisions that streamline how teams access, manage, and utilize customer information.

• Performance Engineering: Apply deep technical expertise to diagnose and resolve critical data system bottlenecks, ensuring high availability while continuously optimizing for performance and data integrity across Yahoo properties.

• Technical Innovation: Pioneer new consumer data applications by developing POCs that advance our data registration, discovery, and segmentation capabilities while strengthening regulatory compliance and enhancing the overall user experience.

• Operational Excellence: Implement robust monitoring, alerting, and self-healing mechanisms for data pipelines that process billions of user interactions daily, consolidating our user data infrastructure with a focus on greater efficiency and reduced risk.

• Technical Mentorship: Provide architectural guidance to engineers across multiple teams, establish best practices for consumer data system design, and influence long-term technical roadmaps that enable teams to leverage user data with maximum efficiency and compliance.

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong emphasis on system design and backend development.

• 5+ years of experience developing large-scale analytics or ML systems for enterprise applications

• 2+ years hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform ecosystem (BigQuery, Dataproc, Composer, Dataflow, BigTable) or AWS equivalent.

• 2+ years working with Hadoop technologies and distributed computing frameworks (Spark, Kafka, Hive, HBase)

• Proven track record implementing data pipelines that process and analyze petabyte-scale datasets

• Strong fundamentals: algorithms, distributed computing, data structure, database

• Fluency with at least one object-oriented programming language from Java, Python, or Scala is highly desirable, as these skills are critical for developing robust applications and managing data workflows effectively. SQL proficiency is also valued for database operations.

• Experience in audience platforms and managing large-scale data is a plus.

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 $160,965.00 - $349,885.00/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.