Backend Software Development Engineer

About Yahoo

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.

About the Media Platform Team

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 team focuses 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.

About You

We are looking for a skilled and motivated Backend Software Development Engineer 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.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain distributed backend services with a focus on scalability, performance, and reliability.
• Develop and optimize GraphQL 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 (NoSQL, RDMS).
• Create caching solutions with Redis and OpenSearch, 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.

Qualifications

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

Required Skills & Experience

• 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 GraphQL APIs.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts (e.g., consistency, availability, partitioning).
• Hands-on experience with NoSQL databases (e.g., DynamoDB, MongoDB) and relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, 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.

Key skills/competency

• Distributed Systems
• Backend Development
• GraphQL API
• RESTful APIs
• NoSQL Databases
• Relational Databases
• Apache Kafka
• Cloud Infrastructure
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Observability Tools