Senior Data Backend Engineer (Ranking Ingestion) (Remote - United Kingdom)

Summary 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 connect people with great local businesses. But have you ever wondered who ensures that search queries sift through over 100 million reviews across millions of businesses in under 400 milliseconds? Who selects the perfect ad from millions of possibilities faster than a blink of an eye? And once a user finds the ideal business for their needs, who ensures that our logs are seamlessly transported, transformed, and indexed to enhance their next experience? We do! We're the data backend engineers who make these systems work with speed, efficiency, and at scale. The Ranking Ingestion team’s mission is to provide a reliable, standardized, and self-serve ingestion framework for the creation and indexing of business information that powers Yelp’s search, ranking algorithms, and presentation layers. We’re responsible for building and maintaining the real-time indexing system that enables massive volumes of Yelp data to be consumable for search and discovery. Our systems are critical to Yelp’s core functionality, powering thousands of user requests per minute. As part of this team, you’ll work on high-throughput, low-latency pipelines and collaborate closely with teams across Search, Ads, and Data Infrastructure to ensure Yelp users get the most relevant and timely results. 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: Work with technologies like Apache Lucene, Apache Flink, Apache Beam, and Kubernetes to build core components of Yelp’s search infrastructure. Design, build, and maintain scalable real-time data ingestion and indexing pipelines. Write clean, maintainable code and documentation, and participate in code reviews to uphold high engineering standards. Collaborate with other engineering teams and product managers to help define and contribute to the technical roadmap. Improve the reliability, observability, and performance of our ingestion infrastructure. Participate in on-call rotations to support the team’s systems and ensure high availability. What it takes to succeed: Fluency in Java, Python, or a similar programming language—familiarity with more than one is a plus. Strong understanding of SQL and experience working with large-scale data processing systems. Solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis. Comprehensive understanding of systems and application design, including operational and reliability trade-offs. Experience with distributed data processing frameworks such as Apache Flink or Apache Beam. Familiarity with search technologies like Apache Lucene or Elasticsearch is a plus. Experience working with containerized environments and orchestration tools like Kubernetes. Excellent written and interpersonal communication skills, with a collaborative mindset. 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. Closing 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. Note: Yelp does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to any recruiting alias or employee. Yelp is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes. #LI-Remote Recruiting and Applicant Privacy Notice


Work with technologies like Apache Lucene, Apache Flink, Apache Beam, and Kubernetes to build core components of Yelp’s search infrastructure. Design, build, and maintain scalable real-time data ingestion and indexing pipelines. Write clean, maintainable code and documentation, and participate in code reviews to uphold high engineering standards. Collaborate with other engineering teams and product managers to help define and contribute to the technical roadmap. Improve the reliability, observability, and performance of our ingestion infrastructure. Participate in on-call rotations to support the team’s systems and ensure high availability.


Fluency in Java, Python, or a similar programming language—familiarity with more than one is a plus. Strong understanding of SQL and experience working with large-scale data processing systems. Solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis. Comprehensive understanding of systems and application design, including operational and reliability trade-offs. Experience with distributed data processing frameworks such as Apache Flink or Apache Beam. Familiarity with search technologies like Apache Lucene or Elasticsearch is a plus. Experience working with containerized environments and orchestration tools like Kubernetes. Excellent written and interpersonal communication skills, with a collaborative mindset.