Prepare for Yelp with a focused mix of coding, design, and communication. Start with your job description and confirm the interview loop with your recruiter.
01 / MAKE YOUR NEXT SESSION COUNT
Find the longest substring without repeating characters. Walk through a repeated character, an empty input, and a string with all unique characters.
Correct window updates, explicit character assumptions, and linear-time reasoning.
Design a notification service. Clarify delivery guarantees, model the data, then handle retries and duplicate events.
Clear requirements, a working baseline, and explicit trade-offs.
Describe a technical decision you changed after receiving feedback. Explain your contribution and the outcome.
Specific actions, honest reflection, and measurable impact.
BEFORE YOU PRACTICE
Get the details that a generic company guide cannot know.
Company-linked challenges and related lessons from our library. Not a prediction of your interview.
Aggregated from candidate submissions and public sources.
Historical figures from existing records; date and location may be unspecified. Verify current ranges on Levels.fyi.
IC1
$144,786
$109,857 base · $27,786 stock · $7,143 bonus
IC2
$176,231
$125,462 base · $45,231 stock · $5,538 bonus
IC3
$243,400
$147,900 base · $78,800 stock · $16,700 bonus
IC4
Not Available
IC5
Not Available
Reviews originally posted on Glassdoor.
Even though Yelp is not a 1st tier tech company comparing to Google, Facebook, it does have the best engineering culture. Hackathon, offsite, snacks and work from home policy, just name it (no dining hall though). Managers care a lot about your growth. They're normally patient and willing to help. They will try their best to help you promote instead of suppressing for higher productivity. Average age is young, great place for new grads and young engineers. People are always nice and willing to help.
Great culture for engineering They really care about personal development of employees Transparent org Great manager. They spend on training manager. If you don't like your manager, you should give feedback and report it. They will try to work on the situation. Great company to start your engineering culture with. No free lunches No game changing work happening in engineering, we are just working to be on par with tech stack in other companies. Be fast in rolling out features. Have team Yelp X or something that secretly work on game changing tech (AR / AI)
Work/life balance: you can walkout free of mind when your day is over Collaborative work culture: no politics within Engineering. Working on a high visibility/popular consumer app. Continue focusing on keeping the product and the infrastructure up to date and fresh. It is exciting to see all these upcoming projects. Be bold, don't hesitate to try new avenues. Be a better champion for your staff and listen to their requests: it took 2 years for the sick time problem to be heard and 6 more months until we hear the proposed solution. The staff skews towards new grads heavily and can lead some demographics to feel old quickly.
Great work-life balance. Generous benefits (on par with other Bay Area tech companies). Strong engineering culture. Engineering and recruiting actively care about improving diversity and creating an atmosphere where everybody is welcome. Yelp’s public reputation may be iffy, but most of the people who work there are amazing. The majority of engineers are nice, helpful people. Jeremy Stoppelman seems like a truly good person who has the best intentions for the company and who wants to put good things back into the world. The weird part of working for Yelp was balancing the public’s perception with my own experience since the two tended to clash.
Engineers are clever and experienced. Managers are understanding and not pushy. Relaxed and laid back work environment. Free beer on tap, and good variety of snacks. Work life balance. Unmotivated engineers and managers. Lack of notice on product details, nothing new to work on except on data mining team. Very conservative approach to product and too many unmaintained features inside app. Try to move product forward. Yelp has huge potential Try to keep engineers motivated.