Content Recommendations Backend - Software Engineer

Yahoo is a global media and tech company that connects people to their passions. We reach nearly 900M people around the world, 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. For partners, we provide a full-stack platform for businesses to amplify growth and drive more meaningful connections across advertising, search and media.
About Our Team
We are the content recommendation and personalization team for all our Yahoo brands. Our system powers properties such as Yahoo.com, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, AOL.com, TechCrunch, AutoBlog and Engadget on the web as well as the mobile experiences. Our data processing pipelines implicitly learn the users' interests and construct their interest graphs from their data. Based on those interest graphs, popularity and trending signals, our system serves content recommendations that are relevant, timely and personalized to the users.
To do all this, we work with technologies such as Vespa (Vespa.ai), Redis, Cassandra, Storm, Kafka, Hadoop, Hive, Pig, Tensorflow, Spark, and gRPC. We develop machine learned models and build pipelines that continuously collect new training data. We also work on various classification models, clustering algorithms, and active learning solutions.
We work on a massive scale, ingest and transform 100s of terabytes of data, build various interesting algorithms and work closely with our data scientists.
What We Are Looking For
We are looking for a Software Backend Engineer to help build the backend technology stack for our recommendation and personalization system. Responsibilities include writing fault tolerant, low latency serving API's, building async workflows that process millions of real-time user events and content, and collaborating with science teams to engineer applied machine learning solutions for content recommendation.
Job Responsibilities

• Work on projects of diverse scope and complexity to design, build, implement, modify, test, debug and deploy software systems, large-scale infrastructure platforms and network services that are the foundation of multiple Yahoo properties, brands and applications
• Responsible for performance, reliability, availability, scalability and security. Services are delivered to applications through standard and proprietary protocols and behavior may be customized via complete APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and/or web services
• Work with project managers and team to collect requirements for product features
• Come up with design specifications for the features and conduct formal and informal design reviews with the team
• Implement and test design across grid, low latency and stand alone technologies
• Launch changes for A/B testing and evaluate impact of the changes on user engagement. Work with the product team on go/no-go decision
• Coordinate with various partner teams to achieve a common goal by discussing and planning the technical solutions

You Must Have

• Bachelors or Masters degree in computer science or related field
• Strong computer science fundamentals
• Good analytical and problem solving skills and confidence
• Ability to code fluently in one of the programming languages
• Past work experience or internship completing complex projects in complex codebases is preferable
• Distributed systems, big data (Hadoop) knowledge is preferable
• Ability to code in Java or similar object oriented languages is a minor advantage
• Statistics knowledge is an advantage

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 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 408-336-1409. Requests and calls received for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.
At Yahoo, we know that diversity makes us stronger. We are committed to a collaborative, inclusive environment that encourages authenticity and fosters a sense of belonging. We strive for everyone to feel valued, connected, and empowered to reach their potential and contribute their best. Check out our diversity and inclusion ( www.yahooinc.com/diversity/ ) page to learn more.
US Only: Please be aware that Yahoo requires all employees entering a U.S. Yahoo office and/or attending a company event (including client events) are required to be vaccinated for COVID-19. This position will require the successful candidate to obtain and show proof of a vaccination to enter a U.S. Yahoo office and/or attending a company event (including client events). Yahoo is an equal opportunity employer, and will provide reasonable accommodation to those individuals who are unable to be vaccinated consistent with federal, state, and local law.
If hired for this position in Colorado, the compensation range for this position is between $79,500.00 - $132,500.00. The compensation may vary depending on your location, skills and experience. The compensation package may also include additional incentive compensation opportunities in the form of discretionary annual bonus or commissions, plus equity incentives. Yahoo provides industry-leading benefits including healthcare, retirement, company holidays, vacation, sick time, parental leave and an employee assistance program. This information is provided per the Colorado Equal Pay Act.
Currently work for Yahoo? Please apply on our internal career site.