Backend Software Development Engineer II

A Little About Us

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 tech company that connects people to their passions. We reach nearly 900 million people worldwide, bringing them closer to what they love—from finance and sports, to shopping, gaming and news—with the trusted products, content and tech that fuel their day.

The Media Platform team supports all Yahoo verticals in developing and delivering the best products to our customers globally with the highest standards. The Media Platform team is focused on enabling the company to build world-class products by creating and supporting services leveraged by multiple verticals. Our team operates with tenets that emphasize building a modern competitive platform regarding service, cost, and capabilities, ensuring services can be self-served, and supporting multiple verticals.

We are looking for a skilled and motivated Software Development Engineer II (SDE II) to join our backend engineering team. This role is ideal for someone with a solid foundation in distributed backend systems who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges, building scalable APIs, and working with modern data infrastructure.

You’ll help design and implement high‑performance services that power user experiences across a wide range of applications. The ideal candidate is detail‑oriented, comfortable with event‑driven architectures, and eager to grow within a collaborative and fast‑moving environment.

We don’t expect you to have experience with every tool listed; curiosity and a willingness to learn go a long way. We value engineers who take pride in clean design, ask good questions, and lift up the team … not just the code.

• Design, build, and maintain distributed backend services with a focus on scalability, performance, and reliability.
• Develop and optimize Graph
  
  QL APIs that serve real‑time and batch data to internal and external consumers.
• Work with a variety of data storage technologies, including cloud storage (S3) and databases (No
  
  SQL, RDMS).
• Create caching solutions with Redis and Open Search, including TTL, invalidation, and indexing strategies.
• Build and manage data pipelines and streaming applications using tools like Apache Kafka, Flink, AWS Lambda or similar technologies.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams including product, frontend, data, and infrastructure to deliver high‑impact features.
• Support observability, operational excellence, and incident response for production services.
• Support infrastructure provisioning using infrastructure‑as‑code (IaC) tools like Terraform, emphasizing reliability and repeatability.
• Contribute to technical design reviews and help evolve architecture decisions.

• Education:
  
  Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.

• 3–5 years of backend software development experience.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Java
  , Kotlin, Go, or Python.
• Experience using core data structures to build and scale RESTful and Graph
  
  QL APIs.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts (e.g., consistency, availability, partitioning).
• Hands‑on experience with No
  
  SQL databases (e.g., Dynamo
  
  DB, Mongo
  
  DB) and relational databases (e.g., Postgre
  
  SQL, MySQL).
• Familiarity with messaging systems (SNS, SQS) or streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Pulsar).
• Exposure to cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and container‑based deployment workflows.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (Github Actions) and observability tools (e.g., Cloudwatch, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog) is a plus.

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…