Hybrid Principal Engineer, AI-Powered Data Intelligence

Yahoo Holdings Inc.; Reston (VA); Hybrid; USD 144,000 - 299,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible hybrid work

Healthcare benefits

401(k)

Job summary

Yahoo Holdings Inc. is seeking a Principal Engineer (IC5) to lead the architecture and development of AI-powered data intelligence platforms at Yahoo scale.

You will define technical direction, build reusable platform capabilities, and guide engineering, analytics, governance, and business teams across the company. This role sits at the intersection of large-scale distributed data systems, enterprise knowledge, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and agentic AI.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building distributed systems and large-scale data platforms, or equivalent experience.
• Degree in CS, AI/ML, Engineering, Math, or related field.
• Deep Python expertise and strong software engineering fundamentals.

Responsibilities

• Define technical vision and architecture for Yahoo's AI-powered data intelligence platform.
• Architect petabyte-scale batch and streaming systems with Beam, Dataflow, Spark, and Kafka.
• Build production RAG and multi-agent systems: semantic metadata integration, agent orchestration.
• Establish evaluation frameworks - retrieval quality, agent accuracy, hallucination rate, operational safety - with automated benchmarking, so we ship AI we can trust.
• Use AI development tools to accelerate design, implement the bar for how the org validates AI-generated code and agent plans.
• Drive adoption of RAG and agentic patterns across engineers.
• Partner with product, governance, infrastructure, and cross-functional priorities.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Python

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS, AI/ML, Engineering, Math, or related field

Tools

Kafka

Beam

Dataflow

Spark

Job description

Yahoo Holdings Inc. is seeking a Principal Engineer (IC5) to lead the architecture and development of AI-powered data intelligence platforms at Yahoo scale.

You will define technical direction, build reusable platform capabilities, and guide engineering, analytics, governance, and business teams across the company. This role sits at the intersection of large-scale distributed data systems, enterprise knowledge, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and agentic AI.