I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Yelp (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2018
Interview
1. Recruiter call followed by a 15min coding challenge - an easy sorting with comparator
2. Phone screen - Talk about experience, interests. followed by coding their own custom problem which involved applying logic similar to finding longest substring with unique characters. Follow up questions on how to scale the problem to run on different nodes, with multiple threads etc..
3. Onsite - 4 rounds.
Round 1 : Coding (their own custom problem) which involved hashmaps, heaps, sorting.
Round 2 : System Design - designing a system similar to finding nearest restaurants given a location.
Round 3 : Behavioral . Challenges faced, Lessons learnt, interesting projects, cultural fit.
Round 4 : This was a very random round. The interviewer didn't show up and a replacement was found after a long wait. He wasn't prepared on what to focus. He threw in a bunch of basic hashmap related coding questions, scaling the algo, resume based etc..
Couple of my interviewers were not on time and they didn't seem well prepared totally.
2
Other Software Engineer Interview Reviews for Yelp
Leetcode style interview online via link, then a 1 on 1 technical interview with a lead developer also online where you can ask questions about the role and working at yelp, later more in depth technical tests and finally references and psicological tests.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Talk about the project you are the most proud of, why do you want to work at yelp
Very intense. 4 back to back 45 minute interviews. One behaviour and four technical interviews.
Nice people but got the vibe everyone was happy with the work as it wasn’t too challenging.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Yelp (Toronto, ON) in May 2025
Interview
Around 3 different rounds with a mix of behavioural and technical. Last round features on-site which lasts the whole day, where there are 2 dsa rounds, 1 system design round and 1 recruiter round to end the day.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Walk us through one project you have done, and some of the challenges you encountered while working on this project