Machine Learning Engineer II

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

Yahoo Mail is the ultimate Consumer Inbox with over 220 million monthly active users. We empower users to run the business of their lives through a fast, intuitive platform while managing billions of daily inbound connections and petabytes of efficient storage. Our engineering team is actively transitioning to a 100% native public cloud architecture.

The Mail Intelligence Org develops intelligent capabilities at scale to uncover user interests, reveal habits, and personalize user journeys across Yahoo Mail and the broader Yahoo ecosystem. We manage billions of messages using advanced backend systems and state-of-the-art AI - including NLP, Generative AI, and autonomous agentic workflows. We are a team of passionate engineers dedicated to high coding standards, world-class architecture, and an owner’s mindset.

A Lot About You

• AI-First Mindset: AI is central to how you innovate, build, and problem-solve. You actively integrate AI tools (Cursor, Copilot, Claude) into your daily development workflows to accelerate iterations and boost output quality.

• Engineered for Scale: You take pride in writing clean, maintainable, and high-performing code that operates seamlessly at massive consumer scale.

• Curious & Adaptable: You stay at the bleeding edge of AI/ML trends—eager to test, adopt, and deploy emerging technologies and models into real-world applications.

• Collaborative Partner: You thrive in cross-functional, global engineering environments, working closely with Tech Leads, Architects, and Engineers to deliver robust features.

• Pragmatic Problem Solver: You know how to balance engineering trade-offs—optimizing for speed, system performance, cost efficiency, and failure-recovery mechanisms in AI/ML solutions.

Responsibilities

• Drive Personalization at Scale: Design, build, and deploy high-throughput AI/ML and NLP models that uncover user insights and power personalized experiences across Yahoo Mail.

• Embed AI-Driven Workflows: Leverage advanced AI tools and modern AI-assisted engineering practices to optimize daily coding, testing, and iteration cycles.

• Process Massive Datasets: Apply machine learning algorithms and big data pipelines to extract value from trillions of data points while maintaining high security and performance standards.

• Build Resilient Systems: Implement robust feedback loops and fallback strategies to handle model edge cases gracefully and preserve seamless user experiences.

• Architectural Evolution: Participate in migrating backend ML services and data infrastructure to a public cloud architecture (GCP).

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate across global engineering groups to integrate Mail Intelligence models into core product platforms seamlessly.

• Uphold Engineering Standards: Maintain exceptional code quality, conduct thorough code reviews, and advocate for sustainable architectural designs.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related technical field; Or, equivalent experience. 

• Experience: 2+ years of hands-on experience developing, training, and deploying machine learning models or data-intensive backend software systems.

• Core Languages: Strong proficiency in Python or Java (C++ is a plus).

• ML Stack & Models: Hands-on experience with modern frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, or Scikit-learn, with exposure to both discriminative and generative AI architectures.

• Model Deployment: Experience deploying models into production using runtimes/frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, Triton Inference Server, or ONNX Runtime.

• Modern AI Workflows: Familiarity with AI-assisted developer environments (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT) for day-to-day code generation and optimization.

• Data Processing: Experience working with distributed big data platforms (e.g., Spark, Hadoop, Kafka).

• Communication: Strong written and verbal communication skills with a track record of collaborating effectively with international teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Cloud Experience: Direct experience deploying AI/ML workloads on public cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

• Domain Knowledge: Prior experience building systems for high-volume email platforms, messaging networks, or large-scale consumer applications.

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 $111,000.00 - $231,250.00/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. 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.