This post brings our Engineering Career Series to an end. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as we’ve enjoyed sharing Yelp’s philosophy on building engineering careers in a thoughtful, equitable, and enjoyable way.

As the series has shown, building a thriving engineering team requires ongoing investment in people and in processes. It requires you to recognize and acknowledge your successes and failures, and continue to iterate and improve. There are no quick fixes and the job is never truly done, but the rewards of improving are huge, for the individuals and for the success of your company as a whole.

What we’ve tried to share with you during this series is not that we’re perfect and that we have all the answers. Instead we wanted to give you some idea of what the journey has been like to get where we are now, and to be open about some of the challenges along the way that you may also encounter in your engineering career – whether you’re an engineer, a technical leader, or a manager.

If there’s one thing I’d like you to take away from the series, it’s that this is worth the effort. There are concrete steps you can take as leaders that will change your engineering culture for the better, and there are contributions that anyone involved in engineering can make that will make people’s careers (and lives) happier, fairer, and more successful.

At Yelp, we’re committed to giving the resources to everyone involved to keep making these efforts, to continuously improve our engineering culture and the experience of everyone who works here. We’d love to welcome anyone else who is as passionate about creating a diverse and inclusive engineering team to join us, or simply to get in touch and share your experiences.

If you’ve not read the rest of the series, here’s a quick recap:

Hiring a diverse team: reducing bias in engineering interviews

How Yelp has approached hiring over the years, and the major lessons we learned in how to reduce bias.

Using structured interviews to improve equity

A key change to our interview process improved equity of outcomes considerably.

How we onboard engineers across the world at Yelp

Once you’ve hired someone amazing, you need to set them up for success on day one.

Career paths for engineers at Yelp

How we designed and redesigned our framework for career growth and levelling, and how that shift increased fairness and equity.

Technical leadership at Yelp

Why we approach technical leadership as a role you can choose to take on at Yelp, rather than just a level within our career path framework.

How Yelp approaches engineering management

What “success” looks like for managers at Yelp, how we hire them, what we ask them to do and to value, and how we’ve built this into the career path for managers.

Ensuring pay equity & career progression in Yelp Engineering

What we learnt from committing to publishing our analysis of pay equity and career progression to all of engineering annually, no matter what the results.

Fostering inclusion & belonging within Yelp Engineering

Improving inclusion and belonging requires you to provide for teams and groups in many different ways. We designed systems and processes that give people the support they need in the time, place and manner they need it.

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