Principal Backend Engineer, Yahoo Weather

Location: United States of America

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

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. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results.

Yahoo is a global media and technology company that reaches nearly 900 million people around the world. From finance and sports, to shopping, weather and news — Yahoo brings people closer to what they love and serves as a trusted guide for people to achieve their goals online. 

About Yahoo Weather

Our north star is to build a weather experience so joyful and helpful, you’ll tell your friends and family about it. We are reimagining the Yahoo Weather product experience across the company – from our mobile apps to the Yahoo homepage. As millions of people use Yahoo Weather each day to understand how the weather will impact them, we believe that investing in a better product experience will help us fulfill Yahoo’s mission to be a trusted guide and enable people to accomplish their goals no matter how big or small. We are excited to speak with principal / staff level engineers for this role.

 

A Lot About You

You are a backend engineer who enjoys scaling consumer-facing web and mobile products. You are curious and passionate about using the latest tools and AI native workflows to increase development velocity and impact for customers. Your work has had a direct and measurable impact on consumers and business results. You enjoy startup opportunities inside established companies. You love to collaborate with product engineers, product managers, and designers  to understand customer problems and deliver great user experiences. You are highly self-sufficient but also thrive when working together with teammates.

As a Principal Backend Engineer you’ll play a critical role in delivering real-time, actionable weather information – forecasts, radar, air quality, severe weather alerts, and photos – to millions of users around the world. If you are interested in joining a world-class team of passionate people and industry veterans who care about code quality, architecture, design and user experience as much as having fun together, then we’d like to talk to you. This role reports to the Head of Yahoo Weather. 

Responsibilities:

• Design, implement, and deploy production backend services exposing well-defined APIs.

• Design APIs for RESTful and GraphQL interfaces, including versioning, authentication, and error handling

• Handle performance debugging and tuning by identifying bottlenecks using profiling, metrics, and logs. Optimize latency, throughput, and resource usage.

• Own end-to-end services, including architecting, developing, testing, deploying, and supporting backend services in production.

• Production observability: implement logging, metrics, tracing, and alerts to support monitoring and incident response.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience with proficiency in one or more backend frameworks: Java Spring or Quarkus, Node.js with Express (or similar), or Python FastAPI (or similar)

• Personal or professional experience using AI native workflows for code generation and code review with tools such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor

• Experience deploying and operating services in at least one public cloud provider (ex., AWS, GCP, Azure).

• Practical experience with multi-threading, async processing, or event-driven models, including common pitfalls.

• Experience building or maintaining pipelines for ingesting, transforming, or validating data from external sources.

• Experience with SQL databases & NoSQL databases: modeling data, writing efficient queries and data access patterns, and recommending appropriate database engines.

• Comfortable reading, debugging, and extending Java codebases, even if not the primary language

• Familiarity with automated build, test, and deployment pipelines for backend services.

• Experience applying caching strategies (ex. in-memory, distributed cache, HTTP caching) to improve performance.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Exposure to or interest in working with geospatial data and databases.

• Willingness to deepen expertise in advanced GraphQL patterns, including schema federation, performance optimization, or API governance.

• Willingness to grow experience in systems with high concurrency, streaming, or near-real-time requirements.

• BS in Computer Science or Engineering or equivalent CS training

• Located in the U.S. Eastern timezone

• An interest in weather is a big 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 $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.