The Yahoo! Champaign office, which just celebrated its extraordinary 5-year anniversary this September, is home to around 90 software developers and five software managers. Located in the middle of the vibrant technology research park on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus, Yahoo! Champaign is primarily made up of employees from the university’s highly ranked Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments in the College of Engineering. Student interns also regularly bring talent and energy to the campus site, and keep the Yahoo! brand strong at this Big Ten engineering powerhouse.

Five years ago, Motorola was consolidating its development sites and focusing its efforts back to its roots in the Chicago suburbs. The Urbana Development Center was one of Motorola’s most experienced mobile OS, application and connectivity teams, with more than 200 software developers, many of whom had strong ties to the local community. Rather than disperse or regroup in the Chicago suburbs, the team sought to find a new and exciting company interested in keeping the team in the Urbana-Champaign community. Yahoo! was quick to act, bringing representatives from HR, senior leadership team, and even co-founder David Filo to campus to lay claim to the local talent. Five years later, the Yahoo! Champaign team is widely recognized as one of the most innovative and loyal teams and well-respected for their product delivery.

Yahoo! Champaign started out with the main responsibility of adding new features to the Search Marketing products pipeline. Currently, Champaign has software ownership of all the advertising data pipelines. In addition to the advertising platforms, Champaign also has several other teams working on critical areas for Yahoo!. The Hadoop team is based in Champaign and has been helping drive Yahoo!'s interest in the Apache open source community for the last two years. Two other projects, Data Highway and Grid Data Management, were also recently moved to Champaign. The site also has a small Linux OS team.

With their highly innovative spirit, Champaign has been a big contributor to Yahoo! Hackdays, including winning the grand prize in the Summer 2012 U.S. Hackday. The team has also been the source of a substantial number of patents submitted to the U.S. patent office for the company.

Last but not least, Champaign engineers give back substantially to the community at large by volunteering for Habitat For Humanity, Crisis Nursery, United Way and various other local charitable events by partnering with Yahoo! Employee Foundation (YEF).

Want to join this awesome office? Search the job openings at our Find a Job page!