Principal Architect

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

The Yahoo Mail Architecture & Core Systems team defines the multi-year technical vision and engineering foundation for one of the world's largest digital communication platforms. Operating at massive global scale across Web, iOS, Android, and distributed backend storage, our squad bridges core platform infrastructure with cutting-edge AI orchestration. We empower over 500+ engineers to ship secure, high-throughput, and AI-native experiences to hundreds of millions of active users daily.

Responsibilities

• 5-Year AI-Native Vision: Architect and execute the 5-year technical roadmap to evolve Yahoo Mail into a modular, agent-driven communication platform, leveraging advanced GenAI frameworks and agentic workflows.

• Executive Strategy & C-Suite Influence: Serve as the primary technical authority for Yahoo Mail, partnering closely with SVPs, Product Leaders, and executive stakeholders to align architectural strategy with broad business objectives.

• Agentic AI & LLMOps Governance: Establish enterprise-grade multi-agent orchestration engines, RAG pipelines, and LLMOps frameworks using approved tools (such as Anthropic Claude via AWS Bedrock), defining guardrails for identity-aware access, hallucination prevention, and inference budget control.

• Enterprise AI Engineering Standards: Lead the adoption of AI-augmented engineering workflows across the organization, setting guidelines for GitHub Copilot usage, automated code quality linting, and AI-assisted architecture reviews.

• Full-Stack & Distributed Systems Architecture: Own the technical continuity across high-concurrency client interfaces, API gateways, distributed search indexing, and low-latency storage engines to guarantee 99.99% system availability.

• Legacy Modernization & Performance: Lead the strategic evolution of legacy monoliths into event-driven, microservice-based cloud architectures, optimizing QPS throughput and infrastructure expenditure.

• Architecture Review Board (ARB) Leadership: Chair the Yahoo Mail Architecture Review Board (ARB), establishing reference architectures, engineering RFC processes, and design governance standards.

• Talent Multiplier & AI Fluency: Mentor technical directors, principal engineers, and architects, fostering an engineering culture grounded in systems thinking, AI-assisted development, and rigorous technical execution.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a comparable technical discipline.

• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of serving as a Chief Architect, VP of Architecture, Technical Fellow, or direct Advisor to CTOs/SVPs (IC7 level).

• Demonstrated experience architecting and deploying production-grade GenAI systems, multi-agent orchestration, RAG pipelines, and LLMOps at enterprise scale.

• Hands-on proficiency with AI-assisted engineering and architectural diagnostics tools (e.g., Anthropic Claude, GitHub Copilot, or AI SQL copilots).

• Proven track record of guiding technical strategy and engineering standards for large-scale organizations (100+ to 500+ developers).

• Deep technical mastery of distributed systems (event-driven architectures, microservices, high-throughput storage, caching) paired with modern web/mobile client performance trade-offs.

• Exceptional strategic communication skills with a demonstrated ability to present complex technical architecture and cost/latency trade-offs to C-suite executives.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or Distributed Systems.

• Direct experience modernizing tier-1 consumer applications (email, messaging, or high-volume real-time platforms) serving 100M+ active users.

• Hands-on familiarity with deploying hybrid on-prem and cloud LLM inference infrastructure for privacy-sensitive data environments.

• A commitment to continuous learning and staying at the forefront of emerging AI capabilities, multi-agent communication protocols, and cloud-native architectural patterns.

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.