Principal Backend Engineer, Yahoo Mail - Calendar

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 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!
As a global email provider, Yahoo Mail is the ultimate Consumer Inbox with over 200 million users. It is the best way to access your email and stay organized from a computer, phone or tablet. We create technology that changes the internet while handling billions of inbound connections per day to manage trillions of messages and events requiring petabytes of efficient storage.

A little about US
The calendar engineering team develops solutions powering our mail brands, including a next-generation infrastructure that we are 100% moving to a native public cloud architecture. The calendar team is responsible for creating the next-generation calendar and notepad experience, along with the supporting infrastructure, to help users effortlessly manage their daily lives.

A lot about YOU

Are you a passionate backend developer eager to elevate your skills and build world-class services using a modern tech stack and robust cloud infrastructure? We’re looking for a highly motivated individual to join our team and become instrumental in designing and implementing the next-generation calendar infrastructure and services that power millions of users. In this role, you will drive the architecture and delivery of high-performance, mission-critical services that power user-facing experiences for millions. You will leverage a complete Java stack to build scalable, reliable, and elegant solutions.

Responsibilities

  • Architectural Leadership & Implementation: Architect and implement innovative features and high-performance REST web services. Drive technical decisions and provide leadership on high-impact projects, ensuring elegant architecture and thoughtful design.

  • Mission-Critical Service Development: Develop and enhance core, mission-critical services, including those utilizing protocols like CalDAV, caching mechanisms, and large-scale data processing, handling hundreds of billions of transactions daily.

  • Product Delivery & Code Quality: Lead the design, implementation, testing, and debugging of features. Ensure the delivery of high-quality, reliable, and testable code through continuous deployment and rigorous code reviews for peers.

  • Team & Technical Influence: Lead, influence, and coach a distributed team of engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning. Share knowledge and mentor team members, and recommend alternative technical approaches to complex problems, leveraging new technology to achieve ambitious goals.

  • Complex Problem Solving: Take ownership of significant application features, tackling hard engineering and user experience problems to deliver elegant and seamless solutions that directly impact millions of users.

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate effectively with product managers and other engineers to define requirements, explore solutions, and deliver new features, enhancements, platform improvements, and bug fixes.

Qualifications

  • BE in Computer Science (or equivalent) with 10+ years of professional software engineering experience

  • 3+ years of experience leading teams by designing, building scalable high-performing distributed systems

  • Experience in OOP, Java preferred, and experience in API development (REST/GraphQL), SQL and NoSql databases.

  • Experience with web servers like Tomcat/Apache/Jetty, Kubernetes framework, TestNG framework

  • Experience in cloud native application development and architecture preferably in GCP or AWS

  • Strong understanding of the fundamentals including Data Structures, Algorithms, OS and Networking

  • Proven expertise in software development, covering key areas such as design patterns, code structure, continuous integration, and deployment architecture.

  • Outstanding written and verbal communication abilities.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Experience with AI Code Assist Tools like Cursor/ClaudeCode

  • Experience developing Mail application, unix environments

  • Experience with SCRUM or similar agile development methodology

  • Experience with mobile web/app development

Important notes for your attention

Applications: 

All applicants must apply for Yahoo openings direct with Yahoo.  We do not authorize any external agencies in India to handle candidates’ applications.   No agency nor individual may charge candidates for any efforts they make on an applicant’s behalf in the hiring process.  

Our internal recruiters will reach out to you directly to discuss the next steps if we determine that the role is a good fit for you.  Selected candidates will go through formal interviews and assessments arranged by Yahoo direct.  

Offer Distributions: 

Our electronic offer letter and documents will be issued through our system for e-signatures, not via individual emails.

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 () 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.

Yahoo has a high degree of flexibility around employee location and hybrid working. In fact, our flexible-hybrid approach to work is one of the things our employees rave about. Most roles don’t require specific regular patterns of in-person office attendance. If you join Yahoo, you may be asked to attend (or travel to attend) on-site work sessions, team-building, or other in-person events. When these occur, you’ll be given notice to make arrangements. 

If you’re curious about how this factors into this role, please discuss with the recruiter.

Currently work for Yahoo? Please apply on our internal career site.

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Common Interview Questions And Answers

1. HOW DO YOU PLAN YOUR DAY?

This is what this question poses: When do you focus and start working seriously? What are the hours you work optimally? Are you a night owl? A morning bird? Remote teams can be made up of people working on different shifts and around the world, so you won't necessarily be stuck in the 9-5 schedule if it's not for you...

2. HOW DO YOU USE THE DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION TOOLS IN DIFFERENT SITUATIONS?

When you're working on a remote team, there's no way to chat in the hallway between meetings or catch up on the latest project during an office carpool. Therefore, virtual communication will be absolutely essential to get your work done...

3. WHAT IS "WORKING REMOTE" REALLY FOR YOU?

Many people want to work remotely because of the flexibility it allows. You can work anywhere and at any time of the day...

4. WHAT DO YOU NEED IN YOUR PHYSICAL WORKSPACE TO SUCCEED IN YOUR WORK?

With this question, companies are looking to see what equipment they may need to provide you with and to verify how aware you are of what remote working could mean for you physically and logistically...

5. HOW DO YOU PROCESS INFORMATION?

Several years ago, I was working in a team to plan a big event. My supervisor made us all work as a team before the big day. One of our activities has been to find out how each of us processes information...

6. HOW DO YOU MANAGE THE CALENDAR AND THE PROGRAM? WHICH APPLICATIONS / SYSTEM DO YOU USE?

Or you may receive even more specific questions, such as: What's on your calendar? Do you plan blocks of time to do certain types of work? Do you have an open calendar that everyone can see?...

7. HOW DO YOU ORGANIZE FILES, LINKS, AND TABS ON YOUR COMPUTER?

Just like your schedule, how you track files and other information is very important. After all, everything is digital!...

8. HOW TO PRIORITIZE WORK?

The day I watched Marie Forleo's film separating the important from the urgent, my life changed. Not all remote jobs start fast, but most of them are...

9. HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR A MEETING AND PREPARE A MEETING? WHAT DO YOU SEE HAPPENING DURING THE MEETING?

Just as communication is essential when working remotely, so is organization. Because you won't have those opportunities in the elevator or a casual conversation in the lunchroom, you should take advantage of the little time you have in a video or phone conference...

10. HOW DO YOU USE TECHNOLOGY ON A DAILY BASIS, IN YOUR WORK AND FOR YOUR PLEASURE?

This is a great question because it shows your comfort level with technology, which is very important for a remote worker because you will be working with technology over time...