Chief Architect

Location: United States of America

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

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 is the second largest email provider in the world, serving hundreds of millions of users at staggering scale. We are undergoing a massive Digital Transformation, moving toward an AI-native and Agentic future. This role is the technical North Star for that journey, defining how we architect systems that are not just "cloud-native," but "AI-first."

Responsibilities

• Strategic Architecture & AI Transformation: Own the 3–5 year vision for Yahoo Mail. Lead the transition from deterministic legacy systems to non-deterministic, agentic architectures, ensuring that AI is woven into the fabric of our storage, search, and delivery layers.

• Internet-Scale Systems Design: Architect distributed systems handling billions of daily events. Optimize high-scale data pipelines to support real-time RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and agentic reasoning at the edge.

• AI-Augmented Engineering Excellence: Define the standards for AI-assisted engineering across the organization. Proactively identify opportunities to replace manual architectural bottlenecks with AI-driven automation, from code generation to automated root-cause analysis of system failures.

• Technical Governance & AI Oversight: Chair architecture reviews. Establish the rigorous validation frameworks required to ensure AI-generated architectural patterns meet Yahoo’s standards for security, cost-efficiency, and 99.99% availability.

• Executive Influence: Act as a trusted advisor to the ELT. Frame technical investments not just as "infrastructure builds," but as "capability accelerators" driven by AI-augmented oversight.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master's degree in Computer Engineering or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 15+ years of engineering experience, with a track record of leading architecture for systems with 100M+ users.

• 3-5+ years of experience leading AI/LLM-led transformations, specifically in moving large-scale enterprises toward agentic or autonomous system behaviors.

• Deep expertise in managing the intersection of traditional distributed systems and AI platforms (e.g., Vertex AI, SageMaker, or custom LLM orchestration).

• A commitment to experimentation with AI-driven developer productivity tools (e.g., Copilot, Cursor) to lead the organization by example.

• Demonstrated ability to influence at the VP/SVP level and represent Yahoo in external technical forums.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with multi-cloud resiliency for AI workloads.

• Expertise in prompt engineering for complex system diagnostics and the governance of AI-agent permissions within a regulated environment.

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 $180,310.00 - $392,430.00/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, in addition to equity incentives. 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.