Senior Software Engineer - User Data Platforms

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.

The User Data Platforms (UDP) team powers Yahoo’s core user identity and profile systems - the foundation that manages data for billions of users across Yahoo products. This includes the User DataBase (UDB), a globally distributed, high-performance data store that runs on-prem on Aerospike and in GCP (Google Cloud Platform) on Spanner; the Canonical Profile (CP) service, which transforms raw user data into structured, well-defined attributes; and the Member Profile (MP) platform, which expands on that foundation by combining declared and inferred user data to enable personalization at scale. The team also operates Hadoop Grid-side services that process and enrich these datasets to deliver near-real-time insights across Yahoo’s ecosystem.

As a Senior Software Development Engineer, you’ll help build, optimize and innovate in these mission-critical systems that power Yahoo’s success. You’ll collaborate with a top-tier geo-distributed DevOps team that uses modern Agile practices and cutting-edge tooling to deliver fast, reliable releases. This role will deepen your expertise in distributed data systems and multi-cloud infrastructure - expanding both your technical depth and long-term career growth opportunities.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy highly available and highly performant infrastructure platforms and network services that support Yahoo’s user data ecosystem.

• Collaborate with architecture and technical leads to define requirements, design solutions, and generate implementation plans with minimal guidance.

• Build and maintain RESTful APIs using Java and modern frameworks, ensuring high throughput and low latency.

• Design and evolve data models and database schemas for multi-master and transactional distributed environments leveraging Aerospike, GCP Spanner, and other database technologies.

• Develop integrations with external vendors through secure tunnels, SDKs, and custom communication frameworks.

• Deploy and monitor multi-cloud services across AWS (Amazon Web Services) and GCP using tools like Lambda, ECS/Fargate, CloudWatch, S3, GKE, and Spanner.

• Ensure scalability, reliability, and security across concurrent projects.

• Leverage AI coding tools such as CoPilot and participate in code reviews to maintain quality and enforce best practices.

• Contribute to Agile ceremonies and DevOps initiatives that enable fast, reliable releases.

• Partner with internal product and engineering teams to ensure effective use and adoption of UDP services across Yahoo

Qualifications

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field - or equivalent practical experience.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development and distributed systems.

• Proven experience in backend/server development and large-scale distributed systems.

• Proficiency in Java and a strong understanding of networking technologies (HTTP, DNS, TCP/IP).

• Experience designing and building RESTful APIs and implementing mutual TLS (mTLS).

• Solid understanding of NoSQL and transactional databases using eventual and strict consistency, and multi-master world-wide replication.

• Hands-on experience with AWS (e.g., S3, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, ECS, Lambda) and GCP (e.g., GKE, Spanner).

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes).

• Experience working in Agile/DevOps environments preferred.

• Excellent communications, collaboration and problem-solving skills.

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 at