Software Dev Engineer

Position: Software Dev Engineer I
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 Yahoo Yahoo is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment,

yahoo!life, and its advertising platform, Yahoo Native.

Yahoo builds, improves, and maintains one of the highest scaling platforms in the world. Their amazing team of engineers work on next-generation data platforms that transform how users connect every single day. Yahoo’s Central Data Platform drives some of the most demanding applications in the industry. The system handles billions of requests a day and runs on some of the largest Hadoop clusters ever built!

50,000 nodes strong and several multi-thousand node clusters bring scalable computing to a whole new level. They work on problems that cover a wide spectrum – from web services to operating systems and networking layers. Their biggest challenges ahead are designing efficient cloud-native data platforms.## About the Role We’re looking for a motivated entry-level AI Engineer to join our AI & ML team in Champaign, Illinois, where you’ll have the opportunity to design and build scalable, high-performance tools in the areas of data governance, orchestration, and query technologies as part of the Central Data Platform Team.

In this role, you will be instrumental in developing and deploying AI-powered features. Your responsibilities will include analyzing requirements, supporting prompt engineering and RAG workflows, and collaborating across product and engineering teams to integrate generative AI into production systems. Furthermore, this role contributes to delivering high-quality software and platform products that underpin Yahoo’s enterprise data ecosystem.## ## Responsibilities
* Assist in building AI features: use Python, LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.), vector embedding pipelines.
* Support prompt engineering and RAG workflows: design, test, iterate prompt templates, integrate vector search.
* Help build and maintain AI-model monitoring/observability dashboards: track model accuracy, latency, drift and work with backend engineers to integrate AI services into the product
* Participate in experimenting with AI workflows: multi-agent orchestration, model fine-tuning, system prompts.
* Working through documents and conversations with colleagues to understand product requirements for new features.
* Work closely with cross-functional teams to understand product and technical roadmaps, identifying potential impacts on system operability and proposing proactive solutions for Cloud environments.
* Lead initiatives to enhance and optimize existing cloud infrastructure, drive improvements in scalability, efficiency, and resilience, and oversee large-scale projects related to cloud platforms, automation, and performance optimization.
* Foster cross-functional collaboration between development, infrastructure, and operations teams to improve the overall performance, reliability, and security of services on the cloud.## ## Requirements
* A solid Computer Science foundation in data structures and algorithms, object-oriented programming, and modern software engineering practices from your achievement of obtaining a degree in CS or a similar engineering pursuit.
* Proactive in staying updated with evolving AI trends and new LLM releases.
* Skilled at diagnosing and solving complex, ambiguous problems with curiosity and a product-focused mindset.
* Experience working with the latest Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI advancements, cloud native AI services like Sagemaker, Vertex

AI,  Lang Chain, Llama Index, or other LLM-orchestration libraries.
* The ability to use an object-oriented programming language like Java or C++, or scripting languages like Python or Perl, and Unix or Linux systems.
* Knowledge of SQL and distributed query engines (e.g., Presto, Trino, Athena, Big…