Sr Manager, Software Development Engineering — Yahoo Mail Anti-Spam and Delivery

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 Yahoo

Yahoo is a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people worldwide, helping them achieve their goals online through a portfolio of iconic products. Yahoo Mail is one of Yahoo’s flagship products and the home of trusted consumer communication at global scale.

About our team

Yahoo Mail is the ultimate consumer inbox, serving more than 220 million users and operating at internet scale. The Yahoo Mail Anti-Spam and Delivery engineering team builds and operates critical infrastructure that protects users from spam, phishing, fraud, and abuse while also ensuring reliable delivery of billions of messages each day across Yahoo Mail and the broader email ecosystem. This work demands extreme reliability, resilience, performance, and strong engineering judgment across distributed systems, data, networking, and standards-based email infrastructure, while also modernizing existing systems and developing cloud-native solutions that improve scale, agility, and developer velocity.

A lot about you

You are an experienced engineering leader who knows how to lead through other leaders and senior engineers, drive clarity in ambiguous spaces, and translate business needs into a coherent technical strategy across multiple squads. You build high-performing organizations by setting clear expectations, developing managers and senior engineers, strengthening team health, and creating the mechanisms that improve execution, quality, and operational excellence over time. You are comfortable operating in a deeply technical environment, reviewing architecture and key metrics, guiding teams through escalation and risk, and making thoughtful tradeoffs that improve long-term system health and business impact.

You are also excited by the opportunity to apply AI thoughtfully in both products and engineering workflows. You bring hands-on experience or strong familiarity with AI and ML concepts, and you are motivated to raise AI fluency across the team to improve detection systems, developer productivity, and engineering effectiveness.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Yahoo Mail Anti-Spam and Delivery engineering organization across multiple squads, with accountability for execution, operations, technical quality, and team health.
• Define and drive strategy for systems that protect users from spam, phishing, fraud, and abuse and for infrastructure that reliably delivers billions of messages a day.
• Translate ambiguous business and product needs into clear technical plans, roadmaps, priorities, and measurable outcomes.
• Partner closely with engineering leaders, product, program management, security, abuse, data, and adjacent platform teams to manage interdependencies and deliver cross-organizational initiatives.
• Guide the organization through critical production issues, escalations, and long-term risk reduction for large-scale distributed systems.
• Establish and continuously improve engineering and operational standards, including metrics, reviews, postmortems, SDLC practices, documentation, onboarding, and learning mechanisms.
• Drive architectural simplification, modernization of existing systems, adoption of cloud-native solutions, and sound build-versus-buy decisions across systems with overlapping responsibilities or dependencies.
• Hire, develop, and retain strong engineers and managers; coach senior talent; build succession plans; and create a culture of accountability, collaboration, and growth.
• Champion thoughtful use of AI to improve anti-spam and anti-abuse capabilities, raise engineering-team AI fluency, and improve developer efficiency and experience.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale backend or distributed systems, with significant experience leading engineering teams.
• 4+ years of engineering management experience, including experience leading senior engineers or managers across multiple teams.
• Proven ability to lead operations and strategy across multiple squads and deliver measurable business impact.
• Strong technical depth in scalable distributed systems, service reliability, systems integration, and performance-sensitive backend infrastructure.
• Experience working in areas such as email delivery, anti-spam, anti-abuse, trust and safety, messaging infrastructure, networking, or similarly complex internet-scale systems.
• Ability to identify technical risks early, make sound tradeoff decisions, and hold teams accountable to high standards of design quality and execution.
• Experience building strong teams through hiring, coaching, performance management, and organizational design.
• Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with the ability to keep partners and executives informed and aligned on strategic initiatives.
• Demonstrated interest and experience in AI, ML, or GenAI applications relevant to engineering systems, abuse detection, or developer productivity.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience leading teams responsible for anti-spam, anti-abuse, fraud prevention, or trust and safety systems.

• Experience with email delivery systems, RFC-driven protocols, and networking layers.

• Familiarity with public cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS and modern cloud-native infrastructure.
• Experience with data mining, classification systems, ML/AI model application, or large-scale data platforms used in detection and ranking problems.
• Experience improving developer experience through tooling, workflow automation, documentation standards, or SDLC improvements.

Why this role

This is a high-impact leadership role for an engineering manager who wants to shape the reliability, safety, and effectiveness of one of the world’s largest consumer email platforms. You will help lead mission-critical systems, grow an experienced organization, and advance the use of AI to make both our products and our engineering teams more effective.

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 $143,625.00 - $299,375.00/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.