Senior Principal AI​/ML Architect, Yahoo Mail

Senior Principal AI/ML Architect, Yahoo Mail (Finance)

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.

Yahoo Mail serves over 220M users globally and operates at massive scale — billions of inbound connections and trillions of messages. Our vision is to be the best consumer inbox that helps users run the business of their lives.

The Mail Intelligence AI/ML Platform powers intelligent capabilities across Yahoo Mail and the broader Yahoo ecosystem. We build systems that extract meaning from unstructured content, understand user context and intent, and deeply personalize user journeys at scale.

We are evolving beyond traditional ML into agentic, assistive, and proactive intelligence — systems that don't just classify or recommend, but reason, act, orchestrate workflows, and assist users autonomously and responsibly.

We are seeking a Senior Principal AI/ML Architect (IC6) to define and drive the architectural vision for agentic, assistive, and personalization intelligence across Yahoo Mail and adjacent Yahoo properties. As the AI/ML Architect scope spans business‑unit level impact, with influence across multiple squads and strategic alignment with business direction. You will define long‑term AI strategy, architecture patterns, evaluation standards, and operational excellence for intelligent systems that operate at global scale.

• Lead architecture for mission‑critical AI systems across the business unit
• Translate ambiguous business opportunities into cohesive AI platform strategy
• Influence technical direction across multiple squads
• Set engineering and operational standards at the business unit level
• Proactively align design choices with long‑term business strategy

• Define reference architectures for:
  • Multi‑agent systems
  • Tool‑augmented LLM orchestration
  • Memory and context frameworks
  • Retrieval + reasoning hybrid architectures
• Establish guardrails, explainability, and responsible AI standards.
• Design human‑in‑the‑loop and autonomy control patterns.

• Define next‑gen personalization architecture:
  • Unified user representation
  • Cross‑product intelligence graph
  • Real‑time ranking and recommendation systems
• Set metrics frameworks and benchmarking standards for personalization quality.

• Lead architectural decisions on:
  • Model serving standardization
  • LLM hosting strategy (self‑hosted vs API)
  • Cost optimization and latency budgets
  • Cross‑team reusable AI infrastructure
• Drive build‑vs‑buy decisions at business‑unit scale.

• Set engineering standards across BU.
• Define evaluation frameworks for LLM and ML quality.
• Establish reproducibility, experimentation, and ML lifecycle governance.
• Champion tech initiatives to scale quality and communication.

• Lead cross‑functional alignment (Product, Data Science, Infra).
• Mentor principal and senior engineers.
• Represent Yahoo engineering externally via talks, blogs, and technical leadership.
• Shape industry best practices in assistive and agentic AI systems.

• Bachelor's degree or Master's degree in Computer Science or related discipline; or equivalent experience
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with deep AI/ML expertise
• Proven track record architecting large‑scale AI platforms
• Strong expertise in:
  • Distributed ML systems
  • LLMs and generative AI
  • Personalization and ranking systems
  • Production inference infrastructure
• Experience influencing architecture across multiple teams or business units
• Demonstrated ability to translate business strategy into technical strategy

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…