Director of Engineering - Developer Experience and Tools

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 seeking an experienced leader to oversee and expand our Developer Experience and Tools organization. In this role, you will guide the creation of frameworks, services, and tooling that empower engineers to deliver high-quality, scalable products—without sacrificing speed, reliability, or coding excellence.

Our ideal candidate is someone who is energized by the opportunity to elevate developer productivity through AI-driven solutions. The Developer Experience and Tooling (DET) team supports the entire engineering organization by building intelligent systems that enhance every stage of the development lifecycle.

As the head of DET, you thrive on improving developer workflows and building the tools that make engineering better. You take pride in developing talent, coaching engineers, and setting consistently high standards for technical design and code quality. You’re someone who takes full ownership—not just of your team’s domain, but of the broader Yahoo codebase and ecosystem. No task feels too big or too small; your focus is on delivering meaningful features and world-class code.

You operate with autonomy, creativity, and a strong bias toward action, especially in fast-paced environments. You enjoy tackling new problems, manage uncertainty with ease, and view setbacks as opportunities to learn and innovate. At your core, you’re passionate about building, optimizing, and shaping the tools that make every engineer’s day more productive and enjoyable.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the vision, strategy, and execution for developer experience across web, mobile, and generative interfaces.

• Build and guide a high-performing team focused on delivering AI-driven tools that significantly enhance engineering productivity.

• Partner with engineering teams from planning through delivery to solve challenging problems in developer workflows and productivity platforms.

• Define and track key engineering metrics to promote efficiency and support a high-performance culture.

• Use dashboards and reporting tools to analyze productivity indicators such as velocity, refactoring trends, and bug resolution times.

• Design and evolve automation frameworks and visualization tools that enable data-driven decision-making.

• Develop or enhance tools that streamline the development cycle and improve day-to-day engineering workflows.

• Provide constructive design and code reviews, and contribute to architectural and technical decision-making across teams.

• Model best practices, processes, and culture to elevate engineering excellence and improve the overall developer experience.

• Own the roadmap for engineering tooling and ensure it aligns with organizational needs and future growth.

Qualifications:

• 15+ years of software development experience with a strong track record of delivering complex, high-impact projects.

• Solid experience designing and building secure, scalable, and innovative software solutions.

• Comfortable using AI tools and techniques—whether for coding, planning, design, or workflow optimization.

• Able to combine technical expertise with good business judgment to drive thoughtful, strategic decisions.

• Naturally curious and growth-oriented, with a genuine interest in how AI is reshaping modern software development.

• Strong communicator and collaborative leader who can work effectively across teams and influence senior stakeholders.

• Hands-on experience creating developer productivity tools, dashboards, and metrics that help engineering teams work more efficiently.

• Empathy for the day-to-day challenges developers face, and an understanding of the tools and processes that reduce friction and improve well-being.

• Experience building AI-powered applications or workflows using LLMs, including methods like RAG and agentic AI.

• Comfortable adapting to new technologies and contributing in a fast-moving, team-focused environment.

Bonus: Experience building, maintaining, or supporting infrastructure.

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 $160,965.00 - $349,885.00/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.