Yelp Engineering and Product

Take a peek into our engineering and product teams and all the work we do.

Engineering News

Keep up with what we're up to and working on! Read our blog posts to see some of the technical problems we solve and keep up to date by following us on Twitter and Facebook.

The Great HTTPS Migration

September 15, 2016 - Andrew E., Technical Lead

Yelp is now entirely on HTTPS! While several pages have been secured for quite some time (we began securing pages with sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, and even the reviews you submit, in 2008), we’ve finally made the transition to using TLS across the entirety of our website. To some, this will sound like quite the accomplishment while others may wonder why it took until mid-2016 to complete this migration. Why Now? Brief History of HTTPS Netscape created SSL in 1994 and by 2000, TLS became the default encryption protocol and the modern HTTPS spec was created. But...

Yelp's Bug-Bounty Map

September 6, 2016 - Martin Georgiev, Software Engineer

For the past two years we’ve been running a private bug-bounty program. We worked with academic researchers and bug hunters from all over the world and, as a result, we have fixed over a hundred potential vulnerabilities, and have paid bug bounties to dozens of security experts. Today we’re launching our public bug-bounty program as our next step towards improving the security of Yelp’s systems and services. Our vulnerability reward payouts will go up to $15,000 USD for the most impactful exploits. Since getting familiar with our infrastructure may be a bit intimidating, we’ve put together some information below to...

PaaStorm: A Streaming Processor

August 25, 2016 - Matt K., Software Engineer

This is the fourth post in a series covering Yelp's real-time streaming data infrastructure. Our series explores in-depth how we stream MySQL updates in real-time with an exactly-once guarantee, how we automatically track & migrate schemas, how we process and transform streams, and finally how we connect all of this into datastores like Redshift and Salesforce. Read the posts in the series: Billions of Messages a Day - Yelp's Real-time Data Pipeline Streaming MySQL tables in real-time to Kafka More Than Just a Schema Store PaaStorm: A Streaming Processor Trouble in Paradise Back in 2010, Yelp open-sourced MRJob, a framework...