Software Dev Engineer - Yahoo Mail - Contacts

Location: India

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.

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.

About Yahoo Mail’s Contacts Platform

Contacts Platform is Yahoo Mail’s contacts aggregation, relationship, and recommendation platform. It is a large-scale distributed system that enhances users’ address books based on their communication history, powers contacts search and compose auto-suggest, and underpins contact-based experiences across Yahoo Mail.

The platform serves hundreds of millions of users and handles billions of requests every day with low latency and high reliability. The platform demands extreme reliability, resilience, and performance, and it tackles some of the toughest challenges in distributed systems, architecture design, algorithms, and data engineering.

Come join an amazing team of Engineers, Product Managers, and Designers building next‑generation contact and relationship experiences that transform how users connect with each other every day on Yahoo Mail.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the architecture of the Yahoo’s Contacts platform to meet demanding requirements on latency, availability, reliability, scalability, and security.

• Design, build, and operate large-scale distributed backend services that power:

  • Contact storage, sync, and lifecycle.

  • Inferred contacts and relationship graphs.

  • Contact search, ranking, and recommendations.

• Lead projects of diverse scope and high complexity: define technical approach, drive design reviews, guide implementation, and ensure smooth rollout and operation.

• Act as technical lead for multi-stream efforts, collaborating closely with Production Engineering/DevOps, Frontend, Product Management, and UX teams.

• Set technical direction and standards for the team: coding practices, design quality, observability, testing, operational readiness, and incident response.

• Proactively identify and reduce technical debt, and drive platform modernization.

• Understand and balance tradeoffs across product, user experience, security, privacy, legal/compliance, and operations to arrive at pragmatic solutions.

• Provide technical mentorship to senior and junior engineers; raise the overall engineering bar through reviews, coaching, and knowledge sharing.

• Where applicable, leverage AI/ML techniques (including GenAI) to improve contact quality, deduplication, ranking, and recommendations.

 

Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on software development experience, including 2+ years as a Lead/Principal/Staff engineer driving complex projects end-to-end and building scalable high-performing distributed systems.

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Strong experience with cloud‑native application development on AWS, GCP or Azure. Experience with GCP is a strong plus, especially with services such as GKE, Dataflow/Apache Beam, Pub/Sub, and Spanner (or similar technologies on other clouds).

• Deep expertise in distributed systems: highly scalable, low-latency serving systems; stream and batch data processing; event-driven architectures.

• Proven track record of building and operating highly scalable, performant, and reliable backend systems in production.

• Demonstrated ability to lead team initiatives, influence technical direction, and collaborate effectively with Production Engineering/DevOps, Frontend, Product, and UX.

• Solid programming skills in one or more modern languages (e.g., Java, Scala, Go, or similar), with strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and concurrency. 

• Experience in API development, SQL and NoSQL databases and distributed caches.

• Experience using AI/ML and GenAI development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) for building and operating production systems is a strong plus, as our team heavily uses AI‑assisted development on a daily basis.

• Experience with integrating AI coding agents into the daily development workflow to optimize debugging, refactoring, and architectural exploration

Important notes for your attention

Applications: 

All applicants must apply for Yahoo openings direct with Yahoo.  We do not authorize any external agencies in India to handle candidates’ applications.   No agency nor individual may charge candidates for any efforts they make on an applicant’s behalf in the hiring process.  

Our internal recruiters will reach out to you directly to discuss the next steps if we determine that the role is a good fit for you.  Selected candidates will go through formal interviews and assessments arranged by Yahoo direct.  

Offer Distributions: 

Our electronic offer letter and documents will be issued through our system for e-signatures, not via individual emails.

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.

Yahoo has a high degree of flexibility around employee location and hybrid working. In fact, our flexible-hybrid approach to work is one of the things our employees rave about. Most roles don’t require specific regular patterns of in-person office attendance. If you join Yahoo, you may be asked to attend (or travel to attend) on-site work sessions, team-building, or other in-person events. When these occur, you’ll be given notice to make arrangements. 

If you’re curious about how this factors into this role, please discuss with the recruiter.

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