Senior Software Engineer - Data Backend (Search Quality) (Remote - United Kingdom) in London

Yelp engineering culture is driven by our values: we’re a cooperative team that values individual authenticity and encourages creative solutions to problems. All new engineers deploy working code their first week, and we strive to broaden individual impact with support from managers, mentors, and teams. At the end of the day, we’re all about helping our users, growing as engineers, and having fun in a collaborative environment.

At Yelp, we’re dedicated to delivering the most relevant search results by leveraging cutting‑edge techniques in machine learning, data mining, and backend engineering. Our engineers play a key role in improving search recall, enriching results with contextual annotations, and optimizing search data pipelines. Their work directly impacts millions of users, helping them find the best local businesses with smarter, more intuitive search experiences. If you're excited about solving complex recall challenges, scaling search infrastructure, and driving innovation in search relevance, we’d love to have you on board!

The Search Quality team is looking for a data‑oriented backend engineer to build and improve our internal systems to better support prototyping, testing, and scaling the next generation of Search with us. You’ll be working closely with engineers on multiple teams to orchestrate a seamless development, testing, and shipping experience that will help bring us closer to our long‑term goals.

This opportunity requires you to be located in the United Kingdom. We’d love to have you apply, even if you don’t feel you meet every single requirement in this posting. At Yelp, we’re looking for great people, not just those who simply check off all the boxes.

What you’ll do:

• Build, extend, and support our backend platforms to support prototyping, testing, and scaling our Search systems.
• Work closely with product‑focused backend engineers on the team to build efficient systems for Search Annotations, Recall, and LLM‑backed search experiences in general.
• Team up with other engineering groups, such as Ads and Market Engineering, to build cohesive backend systems that support our shared visions.
• Contribute to our next gen, smarter search roadmap, vision, and execution.

What it takes to succeed:

• Fluency in an object‑oriented language (like Python or Java).
• Experience with databases (SQL and NoSQL), Unix, developing within a Continuous Integration/Deployment pipeline.
• Proficient in AWS services such as S3, Glue, Athena.
• Skilled in building and supporting large‑scale distributed systems that back a consumer app or website.
• Expertise in building effective APIs (like REST or GraphQL).
• Comfortable with performance analysis tools (e.g. tracers, profilers, debuggers, visualization tools).
• Capable of working and coordinating requirements across teams.
• Excellent documentation skills.
• Interest or experience in developing infrastructure supporting data‑intensive applications.

What you’ll get:

• Full responsibility for projects from day one, a collaborative team, and a dynamic work environment.
• Competitive salary, a pension scheme, and an optional employee stock purchase plan.
• 25 days paid holiday (rising to 29 with service), plus one floating holiday.
• £150 monthly reimbursement to help cover remote working expenses.
• £81 caregiver reimbursement to support dependent care for families.
• Private health insurance, including dental and vision.
• Flexible working hours and meeting‑free Wednesdays.
• Regular 3‑day Hackathons, bi‑weekly learning groups, and productivity spending to support and encourage your career growth.
• Opportunities to participate in digital events and conferences.
• £81 per month to use toward qualifying wellness expenses.
• Quarterly team offsites.

Yelp values diversity. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, medical condition, disability, or any other protected status.