Engineering Blog

Posts for May 2021

Engineering Career Series: Using structured interviews to improve equity

For years, Yelp continued to use an interview process that was created when we were a 50-200 person Engineering organization, with only a handful of interviewers: Each interviewer wrote their own interview questions A few senior leaders gave overall hire/no hire decisions for every panel Interviewers received ad hoc feedback from senior leaders when it seemed like they were too tough or too easy in their interviews A few things went well: there was a strong sense of personal responsibility for both leaders and interviewers turnaround time for offer approvals was quick and Yelp values could be preserved by senior...

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Moderating Promotional Spam and Inappropriate Content in Photos at Scale at Yelp

The trust of our community of consumers and business owners is Yelp’s top priority. We take significant measures to maintain this trust through our state of the art review recommendation algorithms in order to maintain the integrity and quality of the content on our site. Albeit popular, review text is only one of the many types of user-generated content at Yelp. Photos are also a key piece of content and they are increasingly becoming an attack vector for spammers and inappropriate or other unwanted behavior. In this blog post we show how we built a scalable photo moderation workflow leveraging...

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Engineering Career Series: How we onboard engineers across the world at Yelp

Like most companies, Yelp has had to make substantial changes to the way we onboard new team members over the past year. Yelpers have always been naturally good at fostering a welcoming and supportive atmosphere for new employees. Translating this into a welcoming and supportive virtual atmosphere hasn’t happened organically. As we grow distributed teams across the United States, Canada, and Europe, the new ways in which we prepare, welcome, train, and support our employees have become, and will continue to be, important for the advancement of Yelp’s Engineering & Product organizations. Going into 2020, we knew we were already...

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