Senior Research Scientist

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 Mail Intelligence platform is responsible for building the next generation platforms and services enabling Yahoo to deliver deeply personalized content to the hundreds of millions of users wherever they are and whatever mode of consumption they are using. 

We (Mail Intelligence platform) process billions of mail messages(data in tune of several petabytes).With the help of cutting edge algorithms we extract information, build knowledge, interconnect information between different sources to deliver a great experience to our users.  Building this knowledge provides many challenges in the areas of natural language processing, machine learning techniques, big data processing in order of petabytes. You will build tools and workflows to make it easier to manage and act on this vast information. You will apply your insights on the data to build innovative consumer applications for Yahoo.

Yahoo Mail is the ultimate consumer inbox. It is 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. Come join this amazing team of Engineers, Product Managers and Designers to work on next generation innovative experiences transforming how users connect with each other every day.

 

About You:

• You are an expert in developing and applying state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning models to solve complex problems. 

• You thrive in a research-oriented environment and enjoy pushing the boundaries of innovation to deliver impactful solutions. 

• You have a strong academic foundation and are passionate about personalization and user modeling for large-scale systems.

• You excel in transforming theoretical research into practical applications, especially in the domains of Natural Language Processing (NLP), personalization, recommendation systems, and classification tasks.

• You are a hands-on expert with experience in training and evaluating large-scale models, including cutting-edge deep learning architectures. 

• You have a collaborative mindset, excellent communication skills, and the ability to contribute to a high-performing team in a fast-paced environment.

Your Day: 

• Conduct research to develop and advance innovative algorithms for personalization, user modeling, classification, and recommendation systems tailored to large-scale email inboxes.

• Design, train, evaluate, and deploy state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning models, including transformer-based and generative architectures.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate machine learning models into production systems and drive business impact.

• Optimize and fine-tune models for personalization, classification, ranking, and recommendations.

• Develop scalable workflows for processing and analyzing large-scale datasets.

• Stay abreast of the latest research trends and contribute to the team’s thought leadership through publications, patents, or presentations.

• Participate in the design and execution of experiments to validate model effectiveness.

• Mentor and guide junior team members in research and development efforts.

You Must Have:

• PhD (preferred) or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a related field.

• 5+ years of experience in machine learning, deep learning, or related fields, with hands-on work in classification, personalization, recommendation systems, or NLP.

• Strong fundamentals in machine learning and deep learning, with solid expertise in model training and evaluation.

• Comprehensive understanding of deep learning models and architectures, including transformer-based and generative models.

• Hands-on experience with Python and frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch.

• Expertise in NLP, personalization, user modeling, recommendations, and ranking systems.

• Hands-on experience with Huggingface, Pandas, and NumPy.

• Demonstrated problem-solving skills and ability to translate complex concepts into actionable solutions.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a proven ability to work in a team-oriented environment.

You May Have:

• Experience with large language models (LLMs), including fine-tuning or prompt engineering.

• Exposure to cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS

• Knowledge of Information Retrieval, Reinforcement Learning.

• Familiarity with large-scale data processing and analysis tools.

• Contributions to the research community through publications, patents, or participation in competitions like Kaggle.

• Understanding of statistical methods and exploratory data analysis.

 

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.

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.

At Yahoo, we know that diversity makes us stronger. We are committed to a collaborative, inclusive environment that encourages authenticity and fosters a sense of belonging. We strive for everyone to feel valued, connected, and empowered to reach their potential and contribute their best. Check out our diversity and inclusion (www.yahooinc.com/diversity/) page to learn more.

The compensation for this position ranges from $143,625.00 - $299,375.00/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, in addition to equity incentives. Yahoo provides industry-leading benefits including healthcare, 401K savings plan, company holidays, vacation, sick time, parental leave and an employee assistance program. Eligibility requirements apply.

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.