Yelp Backend Engineer Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 19 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Yelp.
Yelp
Backend Developer
Mid Average Positive experience No offer 5 rounds
Interview process
Take home Recruiter call Onsite Panel Recruiter call
Interview formats
Coding Behavioral System Design Coding Behavioral
So first I had to do a Hackerrank coding assignment which was pretty easy. Then I spoke with the recruiter about the role and my background. After that, I had a 1-hour behavioral interview with a team member to see how I'd fit in, where we talked about two of my past projects and what I found challenging about them. Then came the panel interview which had four 45-minute sessions: system design, two coding rounds, and another behavioral one. A couple of weeks later, the team manager gave me a quick call.
Confirmed questions3 questions
- How would you design a system that allows Yelp users to download all their data, including images and videos, which could be up to 5GB for active users?
- Write a function that determines which group gets a restaurant table based on group size and wait time, including scenarios with exact or larger table sizes and shared tables.
- Given a list of places with location and category info, write a function to find places similar to a given place.
Yelp
Backend Software Engineer
Entry Average Neutral experience No offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Phone screen Technical screen
Interview formats
Behavioral Coding Technical
The interview started with a recruiter phone call that was a basic Q and A, which was appreciated. The recruiter asked direct questions, some related to HTTP GET and POST. The next step was a phone interview with an engineer. This engineer asked about my most recent project and then presented a coding challenge. They shared a screen and asked me to type code to find the top 10 chatters from a file of chat messages efficiently, assuming unique usernames. I found doing coding questions on the phone difficult due to typing and holding the phone. The engineer also asked some basic unix questions, and I felt I didn't perform well.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Coding over the phone as listed in the description
Yelp
Senior Backend Engineer
Senior Average Positive experience No offer 5 rounds
Interview process
Take home Phone screen Technical screen Onsite Panel Group Presentation Background check Offer
Interview formats
Coding Technical Behavioral
The interview process kicked off with a Hackerrank coding challenge. After that, there was a 45-minute conversational interview where we discussed your tech projects. The final stage was a single day packed with two technical interviews covering coding and system design, plus one behavioral interview.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Can you describe your current project and elaborate on its technical aspects?
Yelp Backend Engineer Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Yelp interview reports.
“Create a confusion matrix given two input arrays.”
Read reports →“What is the LCA of an N-ary tree?”
Read reports →“Given a list of places with location and category info, write a function to find places similar to a given place.”
Read reports →“Could you code a function that generates pairs from an input array?”
Read reports →“Write a function that determines which group gets a restaurant table based on group size and wait time, including scenarios with exact or larger table sizes and shared tables.”
Read report →“How would you design a system that allows Yelp users to download all their data, including images and videos, which could be up to 5GB for active users?”
Read report →“Could you discuss the differences between Java and C, specifically regarding memory management?”
Read report →“Could you explain how to design a load balancer?”
Read report →“For system design, how would you create a feature allowing users to download their Yelp profile?”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 19 Yelp interview reports.