Machine Learning Engineer II

About the role

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.
• Leverage advanced AI tools and modern AI-assisted engineering practices to optimize daily coding, testing, and iteration cycles.
• Apply machine learning algorithms and big data pipelines to extract value from trillions of data points while maintaining high security and performance standards.
• Implement robust feedback loops and fallback strategies to handle model edge cases gracefully and preserve seamless user experiences.
• Architecturally evolve backend ML services and data infrastructure to a public cloud architecture (GCP).
• 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.

Pay

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.

Schedule

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!