Yelp Software Engineer interview review | Student successfully obtained offer with assistance

This time I want to share what a student said Yelp Interview experience. To be honest, the whole process is not particularly complicated, and the final round only lasts 3 rounds, each round lasting 45 minutes. Compared with some big companies that often require 5 or 6 hours of back-to-back interviews, Yelp’s pace is quite user-friendly. However, the simplicity of the interview does not mean that there are no pitfalls. Especially for students who want to become a Senior Engineer, the system design link is often the key to success or failure.

With the remote training and real-time assistance of our programhelp, this student successfully got the offer. Although the title was eventually downgraded from Senior to Engineer, the overall package was still good. He himself said frankly: "If you hadn't reminded me during the interview process, the system design might have overturned, and the result might not have been an offer." Let me review the entire interview process in detail.

Yelp Software Engineer interview review | Student successfully obtained offer with assistance

Yelp interview process reference

Before sharing the specific interview experience, let’s take a look at the common Yelp software engineer interview process to give you a clear understanding of each step:

1. Resume screening

After submitting your resume, the recruitment team will first screen the materials and confirm that they meet the job requirements, and then contact you for the next step of evaluation.

2. Online Programming Assessment

Many candidates will first take an online programming challenge to test algorithm and coding skills. The difficulty of the questions usually ranges from easy to medium.

3. Technical phone/video preliminary screening

After passing the online test, there will be a round of technical phone or video communication, usually about 30–45 minutes that includes real-time coding questions and a brief discussion of project experience, while focusing on your thinking and analytical skills.

4. In-person or virtual on-site interviews

After passing the initial screening, you will enter a more in-depth technical interview session, including multiple rounds of coding questions, system design questions, and behavioral interviews. In most cases there will be 3–4 rounds of interviews to test overall abilities and cultural fit.

5. Internal review and offer

After all interviews are completed, the recruitment team will compile the feedback for internal review. After approval, HR will notify you of the offer, and the entire process may take a few weeks.

Round One: Coding

The first round is the most common algorithmic problem. The questions are variants of Top K and are implemented using Priority Queue.

Yelp seems to really like to test priority queue related questions. These types of questions have been repeated in our simulation question bank, and the students have already done very similar questions in the training before, so they were very clear in their thinking when they went on the field, and they wrote the complete code without almost getting stuck.

After writing the code, the interviewer also asked some questions related to system design, mainly about data synchronization. Many students tend to panic under this kind of follow-up questions, but since we had a similar reminder before - after the Coding session, we might be asked system level questions in passing, so the participants answered relatively steadily and did not panic because of the temporary extension.

Overall, the round went well and the interviewer was happy with the code implementation and communication.

Round Two: Behavioral

The second round is Behavioral Questions, which is often referred to as BQ.

This part is a completely "eight-legged" type of routine question:

self-introduction
Why Yelp
How to Handle Team Conflict
Most proud project

In many people's eyes, this part is the easiest to take lightly. In fact, Yelp emphasizes cultural fit and team communication. We practiced the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) with the participant in our previous mock interviews, helping him to break down his past experiences into logical stories with highlights.

For example, when answering the question "How do you handle conflicts", the participant did not generalize, but combined a disagreement with a former colleague on architecture selection, and made it clear: what was the background of the conflict, how did he drive the discussion, how did the team finally reach an agreement, and what results were brought about. Such an answer seemed both real and organized, and the interviewer sounded comfortable.

The atmosphere was very relaxed throughout the round, and the interviewer even chatted with the participant about some of Yelp's internal practices for their restaurant recommendation system.

Round Three: System Design

The third round is the most important and problematic part of the whole interview - system design. The question is a design question related to the ordering system, which covers various aspects such as high concurrency processing, queue design, data consistency and so on.

At first the trainee's thoughts were quite complete, starting with the overall framework: order generation, processing flow, and subsequent data storage and query. However, as the interviewer gradually went deeper and deeper, the inexperience in many details was gradually exposed.

Here's a key point: trainees usually work mainly with the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)But in his heart he always felt Kafka The interviewer immediately followed up by asking several questions about Kafka, such as: "What is Kafka? So, I mentioned Kafka during the interview, and the result was predictable, the interviewer immediately followed up and asked several questions about Kafka, such as:

Difference between Kafka and SQS in terms of throughput?
How to handle consumer group failure in Kafka?
What is Kafka's data persistence and recovery mechanism?

This is where the danger arises: the participant only knows a little bit about Kafka, and many of his answers will only be of a general nature. If he follows the original preparation, he may get more and more confused and drag himself into the pit.

It's good that we reminded him in time during the remote voice assist, "Don't hard-answer something you're not familiar with, go back to the SQS system you're familiar with." So the trainee quickly adjusted his strategy and pulled the focus back to the actual experience of using Amazon SQS, adding details about how he did message retries and how to ensure message order in his project. In this way, although they did not show a deep mastery of Kafka, at least they avoided a complete collapse.

final result

A few days later, the trainee received a Yelp offerBut it was a bit different than expected: originally, HR said the position would be for a new person. But it fell a little short of expectations: originally, HR communicated that the position would be Senior Software EngineerThe salary range is approximately 130k - 160kHowever, in the end, the system was downgraded to Senior because the design aspects of the system did not meet Senior's standards. Software Engineer.

Although the title was downgraded, the overall salary package was still good. The trainee also had some regrets: after all, the feeling of having his expectations broken is totally different from that of not being a Senior in the first place. However, he knows very well that the interview is a competition of comprehensive ability, especially for system design, and the on-the-spot response is better than brushing up the questions to open up the gap.

Summarizing and reflecting

Yelp's interview process is only 3 rounds, but each round has a different focus:

Coding: Priority queues, Top K and other classic questions must be skilled;
Behavioral: Use the STAR method to make sense of the experience;
System Design: It's more important to avoid digging a hole for yourself and to showcase areas you know well.

For students who want to hit Senior, system design ability is a hard indicator, both architectural thinking, but also to be able to put the details into practice scenarios.

This participant's experience also illustrates a problem: very often, failure is not due to the fact that you don't know how to do it, but due to the fact that you say something you are not familiar with at the critical moment, which brings the situation to a wrong direction. If we hadn't reminded him in real time, he probably would have completely flopped at the Kafka level and couldn't even get an offer.

For students who are preparing for Yelp or other big plants

If you're also preparing for OA / interviews with Yelp or other big North American companies, there's really no need to tough it out alone:

Our team has a long history of providing OA ghostwriting services(HackerRank, CodeSignal, Cowboys.com full coverage), pass rate guaranteed;

Remote Voice Assist / Real-time AlertsThis will help you avoid "digging your own hole" during the interview process;

Mock Interviews & CoachingThe BQ story and system design ideas will be broken down for you in advance.

Compared to endlessly brushing up the question bank, the real determinant of success or failure is often the performance on the spot. Being reminded at a critical moment that "it's time to make up an edge case" and "don't take the topic into unfamiliar territory" is often the key difference between being able to AC a question and being able to get an additional offer.