Sr Manager, Software Development Engineering — Yahoo Mail Anti-Spam and Delivery

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 Yahoo

Yahoo is a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people worldwide, helping them achieve their goals online through a portfolio of iconic products. Yahoo Mail is one of Yahoo’s flagship products and the home of trusted consumer communication at global scale.

About our team

Yahoo Mail is the ultimate consumer inbox, serving more than 220 million users and operating at internet scale. The Yahoo Mail Anti-Spam and Delivery engineering team builds and operates critical infrastructure that protects users from spam, phishing, fraud, and abuse while also ensuring reliable delivery of billions of messages each day across Yahoo Mail and the broader email ecosystem. This work demands extreme reliability, resilience, performance, and strong engineering judgment across distributed systems, data, networking, and standards-based email infrastructure, while also modernizing existing systems and developing cloud-native solutions that improve scale, agility, and developer velocity.

A lot about you

You are an experienced engineering leader who knows how to lead through other leaders and senior engineers, drive clarity in ambiguous spaces, and translate business needs into a coherent technical strategy across multiple squads. You build high-performing organizations by setting clear expectations, developing managers and senior engineers, strengthening team health, and creating the mechanisms that improve execution, quality, and operational excellence over time. You are comfortable operating in a deeply technical environment, reviewing architecture and key metrics, guiding teams through escalation and risk, and making thoughtful tradeoffs that improve long-term system health and business impact.

You are also excited by the opportunity to apply AI thoughtfully in both products and engineering workflows. You bring hands-on experience or strong familiarity with AI and ML concepts, and you are motivated to raise AI fluency across the team to improve detection systems, developer productivity, and engineering effectiveness.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Yahoo Mail Anti-Spam and Delivery engineering organization across multiple squads, with accountability for execution, operations, technical quality, and team health.
• Define and drive strategy for systems that protect users from spam, phishing, fraud, and abuse and for infrastructure that reliably delivers billions of messages a day.
• Translate ambiguous business and product needs into clear technical plans, roadmaps, priorities, and measurable outcomes.
• Partner closely with engineering leaders, product, program management, security, abuse, data, and adjacent platform teams to manage interdependencies and deliver cross-organizational initiatives.
• Guide the organization through critical production issues, escalations, and long-term risk reduction for large-scale distributed systems.
• Establish and continuously improve engineering and operational standards, including metrics, reviews, postmortems, SDLC practices, documentation, onboarding, and learning mechanisms.
• Drive architectural simplification, modernization of existing systems, adoption of cloud-native solutions, and sound build-versus-buy decisions across systems with overlapping responsibilities or dependencies.
• Hire, develop, and retain strong engineers and managers; coach senior talent; build succession plans; and create a culture of accountability, collaboration, and growth.
• Champion thoughtful use of AI to improve anti-spam and anti-abuse capabilities, raise engineering-team AI fluency, and improve developer efficiency and experience.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale backend or distributed systems, with significant experience leading engineering teams.
• 4+ years of engineering management experience, including experience leading senior engineers or managers across multiple teams.
• Proven ability to lead operations and strategy across multiple squads and deliver measurable business impact.
• Strong technical depth in scalable distributed systems, service reliability, systems integration, and performance-sensitive backend infrastructure.
• Experience working in areas such as email delivery, anti-spam, anti-abuse, trust and safety, messaging infrastructure, networking, or similarly complex internet-scale systems.