Recruiter call, followed by a 15-minute coding challenge: an easy sorting problem with a comparator.
Phone screen: Talk about experience and interests, followed by coding their own custom problem. This involved applying logic similar to finding the longest substring with unique characters. Follow-up questions covered how to scale the problem to run on different nodes, with multiple threads, etc.
Onsite: Four rounds. Round 1: Coding (their own custom problem) which involved hashmaps, heaps, and sorting. Round 2: System Design - designing a system similar to finding nearest restaurants given a location. Round 3: Behavioral. Challenges faced, lessons learned, interesting projects, and 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 well-prepared on what to focus on. He threw in a bunch of basic hashmap-related coding questions, scaling the algorithm, and resume-based questions.
Some of my interviewers were not on time, and they didn't seem well-prepared.
The following metrics were computed from 92 interview experiences for the Yelp Software Engineer role in San Francisco, California.
Yelp's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in San Francisco, California is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.
Candidates reported having very good feelings for Yelp's Software Engineer interview process in San Francisco, California.