Software Engineer

Yelp connects people with great local businesses. Our users have contributed approximately 108 million cumulative reviews of almost every type of local business, from restaurants, boutiques and salons to dentists, mechanics, plumbers and more. These reviews are written by people using Yelp to share their everyday local business experiences, giving voice to consumers and bringing “word of mouth” online.

Our Search & Data Mining, Ads and Spam Prevention teams see tens of millions of Yelp reviews and 130M+ monthly unique visitors as one giant playground for data mining. They banter about Bandits, know their way down a Gradient, and aren’t too Naïve to kick back in our Bay(es) Area offices. We love new ideas and collaboration: don’t come here with any Prior prejudices or you will Maximize your Likelihood of getting your Posterior kicked.

* Work with the team to come up with creative ideas for new products and signals, then carry those ideas all the way to launch. * Explore data to measure the impact of your changes and come up with ideas for how to maximize that impact. * Work closely with infrastructure engineers to make sure that your algorithms will effectively scale to large data sets and to ensure that their systems provide the flexibility needed for your ideas.

**You should have** * A passion for big data, and creative ideas for what to do with it. * The algorithms and data structures experience to make your ideas workable. * The coding experience to turn those ideas into reality. We use Java & Python. You don’t need to be an expert, but experience is a plus and we will expect you to learn them on the job. * A background in Machine Learning or Information Retrieval. * Minimum BA/BS degree in Computer Science, Math, or related degree * A love of delighting people with local knowledge. **Pluses** * Experience working with ElasticSearch, Lucene, Hadoop, or mrjob * Experience applying Auction theory, CTR prediction, Game theory, Graph theory, Natural language processing, Recommender systems, Spam detection, Stochastic optimization