Sr. Data Engineer - Data Modeling & Governance

Engg; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Yahoo Mail is seeking an experienced Data Engineer to architect enterprise data models and governance practices across large-scale data platforms. You will design AI-ready data layers, feature stores, and scalable pipelines to support real-time ML and personalized product features.

Responsibilities include optimizing distributed architectures on cloud ecosystems, promoting AI-assisted tooling, and mentoring senior engineers while aligning data schemas with business goals and analytics needs.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in CS, Data Eng, or related field.

Responsibilities

• Architect enterprise data models and schemas for multi-tenant use.
• Govern data with privacy by design and data lineage.
• Design AI-ready data layers and feature stores for real-time ML.
• Optimize distributed compute across cloud platforms (GCP/AWS).
• Champion AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate pipelines.
• Provide architectural governance and mentor senior engineers.

Skills

Data modeling

AI/ML architecture

Cloud architecture

DevOps practices

Data governance

SQL / query optimization

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or related field

Tools

GitHub Copilot

Cursor

LLM-driven query engines

BigQuery

Snowflake

Dataflow

Pub/Sub

Kafka

Flink

Job description

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 Us

The Yahoo Mail Data organization enables Yahoo to leverage data to power our customer’s intelligent experiences, make critical data-driven decisions and drive multiple business functions. Our team designs and governs the massive, distributed data foundation that powers experiences for hundreds of millions of active Yahoo Mail users globally. We design and build the future of how teams work with data with agentic automation across Data Engineering & Infrastructure. Our Data Platforms and Products empower Data Science & Analytics, AI/ML, Product, Marketing, Commerce, Finance and Business teams across Yahoo to turn multi-petabyte datasets into real-time consumer insights and next-generation agentic/GAI workflows and features. We are looking for exceptional Data Engineers to join our team and help guide, innovate and evolve our Data Models & our Data Governance practices. We are committed to building an inclusive team as we design the future of data at Yahoo Mail. Come help us build the future of Mail Data.

Responsibilities

• Enterprise Data Modeling & Schema Design: Architect, optimize, and maintain Yahoo Mail’s foundational data models and schemas, delivering high-performance, cost-efficient data structures that serve multi-tenant consumers across Data Science, AI/ML, Product, and Marketing (IC5 level).
• Agentic Data Governance & Privacy by Design: Architect modern data governance methodologies for the agentic AI era—establishing formal ontologies, enterprise naming conventions, data lineage tracking, and automated quality validation engines while maintaining rigorous consumer privacy and security standards.
• AI-Ready Feature & ML Modeling: Design and implement optimized data layers and vector-ready feature stores that power real-time AI/ML Mail Intelligence, downstream generative AI agents, and personalized consumer product features.
• Distributed Architecture & Compute Optimization: Refine distributed data systems across cloud ecosystems (GCP/BigQuery/Dataflow), minimizing expensive analytical compute operations and maximizing query performance at massive global scale.
• AI-Augmented Engineering Workflows: Champion the adoption of AI-assisted engineering tools (such as GitHub Copilot Enterprise and Anthropic Claude via AWS Bedrock) to accelerate data pipeline scripting, automate schema documentation, and detect data quality anomalies.
• Architectural Judgment & Validation: Exercise expert architectural judgment in establishing safe boundaries between automated, AI-assisted code generation and deterministic data model design, preventing hallucinations and schema drift.
• Cross-Functional Technical Leadership: Collaborate closely with cross-functional engineering and stakeholder teams, acting as a technical authority with Data Science leads, Principal Architects, and Product Directors across Yahoo to align data schemas with strategic business goals and analytical requirements.
• Technical Stewardship & Mentorship: Chair data design reviews, establish organizational data modeling standards, and mentor senior data engineers across Yahoo Mail.
• Contribute to a culture: of continuous learning and growth.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent practical experience).
• 10+ years of professional software or data engineering experience, with a proven track record of architecting and owning significant, enterprise-scale data models (IC5 level).
• Demonstrated hands-on experience utilizing AI-assisted development platforms (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, LLM-driven query engines) to accelerate architectural design, SQL authoring, and pipeline optimization.
• Deep technical expertise in cloud-native distributed data architectures, data warehousing, and schema optimization at petabyte scale.
• Direct experience designing data models, feature stores, and data pipelines that directly feed production AI/ML models, Data Products for Insights, recommendation engines, or LLM applications.
• Proven experience defining enterprise data governance, metadata management, schema evolution, and end-to-end data lineage frameworks.
• Strong familiarity with modern DevOps and infrastructure practices (CI/CD, Terraform, container orchestration).

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on expertise with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or AWS data services at enterprise scale
• Hands-on experience with either BigQuery, Lakebase or Snowflake at enterprise scale.
• Experience with Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Kafka, Apache Flink, or other streaming technologies and low latency distributed caching layers.
• Experience architecting graph database structures or knowledge graphs to support entity resolution and relational data discovery.
• Experience designing real-time verification frameworks or guardrails for validating AI-generated data pipelines and automated query outputs.
• Familiarity with streaming architectures (Kafka, Apache Flink) and low-latency distributed caching layers.
• Strong technical writing and communication skills with a track record of authoring architecture RFCs and mentoring engineering squads.
• Deep knowledge of real-time data governance and AI-generated output validation.
• Demonstrated abilities in prompt engineering for automating technical documentation and system architecture mapping.

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 hybr