Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure & Automation

About Search

Yahoo Search is one of the most highly scaled applications on the planet. We hire world class engineers to support our ambitious product and platform goals. Our engineers work in a highly collaborative environment with a strong emphasis on technical excellence and innovation. This is a unique opportunity as we’re reimagining the future of Search, to reinvent how users find information and accomplish their goals. To achieve this vision, we’re integrating new technology and expanding our infrastructure. This role demands strategic partnership, analytical thinking, exceptional planning and execution skills, ambitious innovation, obsession with quality and user needs, and a passion for solving complex problems. If you’re someone who enjoys being part of high performing teams, this role is for you!

About the Role

We’re looking for an operations-savvy Software Engineer to join the Search Production Engineering team, as we migrate services from traditional datacenters to public cloud infrastructure (primarily AWS). This role is ideal for someone who enjoys writing robust code to solve real operational problems at scale. You’ll contribute to the tooling, automation, and infrastructure that enables reliable and scalable service delivery across cloud platforms.

This isn’t a product engineering role—your stakeholders are fellow engineers, and your mission is to make their lives easier through automation and platform improvements.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain tools and services that support deployment, observability, scaling, and reliability across our cloud environments.
• Automate infrastructure and operations workflows using Infrastructure-as-Code and config management tools.
• Participate in service migration projects, helping to containerize, deploy, and operate services in AWS.
• Collaborate with DevOps and SRE teams to improve operational standards, reduce toil, and codify best practices.
• Develop operational tools that may integrate AI/ML capabilities (e.g., large language model APIs, intelligent alerting, anomaly detection).
• Debug and fix issues in systems you help build—ownership doesn’t stop at the last commit.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and team standups.

What We’re Looking For

• 3–7 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in at least one programming language used for infrastructure automation (Python and/or Go preferred).
• Familiarity with modern CI/CD practices and tools (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, etc.).
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating systems in large-scale production environments—especially in public cloud (AWS preferred).
• Solid grasp of Linux systems, containers (Docker), and orchestration tools (e.g., Kubernetes, ECS, Nomad).
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform preferred)
• Working knowledge of monitoring, alerting, and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch).
• Clear communication skills, and the ability to collaborate well across teams.

Nice to Have

• Exposure to service mesh technologies (e.g., Istio, Linkerd).
• Experience migrating services from on-prem to cloud environments.
• Familiarity with secrets management, identity/access control, and security-first design.
• Experience supporting production on-call rotations, or collaborating with SREs on incident response.
• Exposure to AI/ML frameworks or APIs (e.g., OpenAI API, Hugging Face Transformers, Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker).

What Success Looks Like

• You consistently deliver high-quality, maintainable code that improves the reliability and operability of our systems.
• You can independently take a service or tool from concept to production.
• You help drive down manual toil through automation and smart design.
• You build trust with peers across engineering and operations.