Chief Architect

Role details

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 Yahoo Mail is one of the world's largest communication platforms, serving over 100M+ daily active global users with high-concurrency, continuous availability systems. Our engineering organization is undergoing a transformative evolution to modernize legacy infrastructure into an AI-native, modular, and agent-driven platform. As part of our core architecture team, you will shape the multi-year technical vision, guide a 500+ person engineering organization, and define how modern AI technologies transform communication for millions of people. Responsibilities Executive Strategy & C-Suite Influence: Serve as the primary technical authority for Yahoo Mail, partnering closely with SVPs, Product Leaders, and C-suite executives to align long-term business vision with architectural strategy and drive consensus across engineering domains. End-to-End Platform Architecture: Own the full-stack architectural vision across client interfaces (Web, iOS, Android), API layers, search engines, distributed storage, and security, ensuring backend platform optimizations directly improve client performance and latency. Agentic AI & Platform Governance: Lead the adoption of enterprise-grade GenAI, multi-agent orchestration, RAG pipelines, and LLMOps; establish identity-aware access controls, budget governance, safety guardrails, and automated review workflows to eliminate AI hallucinations and compliance risks. AI-Augmented Developer Velocity: Drive the enterprise adoption of AI pair-programming tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor) and automated code review pipelines across the 500+ engineering organization, converting manual engineering overhead into continuous workflow automation. Legacy System Modernization: Lead the evolution of high-concurrency, low-latency monoliths into cloud-native, microservice, and event-driven architectures—delivering 99.99% availability, high throughput, and optimized operational spend. Engineering Standards & Mentorship: Chair the Architecture Review Board (ARB), define enterprise reference architectures, establish prompt engineering and AI-safety standards, and mentor technical leads, directors, and principal architects to elevate overall engineering capability. Basic Qualifications 15+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record as a Chief Architect, VP of Architecture, Technical Fellow, or direct Advisor to C-suite executives governing large-scale enterprise platforms. Demonstrated experience leading technical strategy and multi-year architectural roadmaps for engineering organizations of 100+ to 500+ developers across multi-component software ecosystems. Hands-on production experience architecting and deploying production-grade GenAI systems, multi-agent orchestration, RAG platforms, or LLMOps pipelines at scale, with proven models for AI output validation, hallucination detection, and token cost governance. Deep technical mastery of backend distributed systems (high-throughput storage, event-driven streaming, microservices, caching) paired with a solid grasp of modern client architectures (API design, mobile/web performance, UX latency trade-offs). Mastery of trade-off articulation, with exceptional verbal and written communication skills to translate complex distributed systems trade-offs into clear strategic narratives for executive stakeholders. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Preferred Qualifications Active involvement in the broader AI community, with a track record of publishing architectural frameworks, patents, or contributing to enterprise-grade open-source GenAI or distributed systems initiatives. Experience leading internal AI Centers of Excellence or driving large-scale organizational transformations toward AI-native software development paradigms. Proven track record of managing zero-downtime modernizations of high-throughput legacy systems (100k+ QPS) into cloud-native microservices environments. 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 fo