Search and ranking are part of many important features of Yelp - from looking for a plumber to showing relevant photos of the dish you search for. These varied use-cases led to the creation of Yelp’s Elasticsearch-based ranking platform, allowing real-time indexing, learning-to-rank, lesser maintenance overhead, and enabling access to search functionality to more teams at Yelp. We recently built Nrtsearch, a Lucene-based search engine, to replace Elasticsearch. Why Replace Elasticsearch? Our Elasticsearch-based ranking platform had been working well with a wide variety of applications deployed on it. But as we onboarded more use-cases, Elasticsearch costs didn’t scale as well...

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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...

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Recruiting, hiring, and onboarding new employees in Engineering at Yelp is a multi-team, cross-functional effort as we have laid out in our Career Series blog posts. But once people are here, how do we retain them? While career advancement, technical leadership, and pay equity are all important components to building a happy engineering team, we believe fostering inclusion and belonging is also a fundamental component in supporting, and thus retaining, people. While this is an area that’s received a lot of recent attention in the tech industry, we’ve prioritized inclusion and belonging for many years because we want all of...

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At Yelp, we care deeply about ensuring all employees are compensated fairly for their contributions, regardless of their gender, race, and ethnicity. Within Yelp Engineering, we work hard to achieve equal pay for equal work through a combination of tactics: Well-defined career levels and corresponding pay bands A systematic levels calibration process across teams Transparency of our outcomes with the entire Engineering team In a previous blog post, we described how we think about career progression and leveling. Each level within Engineering and Engineering Management has an associated merit band, equity band, and cash bonus target based on location. We...

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When Yelp first started building engineering and product teams in Canada in 2019, our plan was to create a workforce based out of our Toronto office. Over the past year as we adapted to being an entirely remote workforce we realized, like many companies, that people don’t need to work in offices to be collaborative and successful. In fact, through remote work surveys sent to our employees, we found that most people are happier and more productive when they have the option to work remotely. We’re now hiring engineering and product roles as fully remote in Canada, as well as...

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Introduction Have you ever run an A/B test and needed to change cohort allocations in the middle of the experiment? If so, you might have observed some surprising results when analyzing your metrics. Changing cohort allocation can make experiment analysis tricky and even lead to false conclusions if one is not careful. In this blog post, we show what can go wrong and offer solutions. At Yelp, we are constantly iterating on our products to make them more useful and engaging for our customers. In order to ensure that the Yelp experience is constantly improving, we run A/B tests prior...

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In our last post we talked about technical leadership, one of the growth paths available to software engineers at Yelp. In this post we’d like to share more about engineering management, which is another path that some software engineers choose after some time in the industry. We’ll start with an explanation of what engineering management is (and isn’t), discuss our approach to management, and talk about what makes it different from engineering. We’ll also discuss how people get started on a management path at Yelp, and what we do to help our management team grow in their roles. What’s an...

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Hi there! In this post we’re discussing technical leadership, a topic that is paramount to any engineering organization, but is also hard to define. Even observing whether your team, organization, or company has good technical leadership can be a challenge. You might be thinking right now, “Am I a good technical leader?” To help describe how Yelp thinks about technical leadership, we have two of our Group Tech Leads (a.k.a. GTL, more on what this is later) writing this post. They are both seasoned Yelpers who have held a number of technical leadership roles — they were even willing test...

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