Software Engineer - Data Backend Engineer (Remote - Canada)

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.

Are you passionate about building AI- and ML-powered systems that protect millions of users from fraud, spam, and deceptive behaviors? As part of Yelp’s Trust & Safety Traffic Team, you'll play a key role in maintaining the authenticity and integrity of our platform by developing solutions that detect and neutralize threats from fake reviews, malicious traffic, and automated abuse.

In this role, you'll work with vast and ever-growing datasets, collaborating with cross-functional teams under disciplined privacy protocols. Your work will focus on building and scaling ML infrastructure and models that keep Yelp a trusted place for real people to connect with great local businesses. You'll have the opportunity to leverage cutting-edge technologies such as neural networks, large language models, and traditional ML techniques while keeping our systems secure and reliable in a continuously evolving adversarial environment.

This opportunity is fully remote and does not require you to be located in any particular area in Canada. We welcome applicants from throughout Canada. 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:

• Design, build, and maintain secure, compliant ML infrastructure and automation adapted for high-sensitivity environments.
• Develop and productionize machine learning and data pipelines serving real-time models that fight fraudulent traffic, spam, and bots.
• Extract valuable signals from massive datasets, using your expertise to turn raw data into actionable insights.
• Dive deep into data to uncover patterns indicative of suspicious or fraudulent behavior and iterate on detection signals.
• Drive adoption of best practices in MLOps (model versioning, CI/CD for ML, monitoring) and ensure robust privacy/data protection controls.
• Collaborate closely with teams across Yelp, including Core ML, Security, and Product, to proactively defend our users and business metrics.
• Provide technical mentorship and contribute to the continuous improvement of engineering standards and experimentation processes.

What it takes to succeed:

• Solid foundation in software engineering and machine learning/data engineering best practices.
• Experience designing or adapting ML infrastructure, MLOps tooling, and data pipelines in Python (e.g., pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, XGBoost), Spark, AWS (e.g., S3, Redshift), and modern databases (e.g., SQL/NoSQL).
• Demonstrated ability to build large-scale, real-time distributed systems for detecting abuse, fraud, or adversarial behavior.
• Deep understanding of privacy, data protection, secure engineering, and access control within ML systems.
• Comfort working independently in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment, with the curiosity and tenacity to tackle evolving problems.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset, especially when handling sensitive projects under NDA.
• Bonus: Experience with Kubernetes, MLflow, Kubeflow, Airflow, Scala, MapReduce, Flink, Cassandra, or related technologies.

What you'll get:

• There are a variety of factors that go into determining a compensation range, including but not limited to external market benchmark data and years of experience. Based on the anticipated level of experience that we are seeking, we expect the compensation range for this role to be between $101,000 and $237,000. The actual compensation offered may be influenced by a variety of factors, including the candidate’s experience and skill set.

  There may be flexibility with the range included in this posting should a candidate be leveled higher or lower than the posted range.

• This opportunity has the option to be fully remote in all locations across Canada.
• This role is posted to fill an existing position.
• You can find more information about Yelp's five star benefits here!

Closing

At Yelp, we believe that diversity is an expression of all the unique characteristics that make us human: race, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, and education — and those are just a few. We recognize that diverse backgrounds and perspectives strengthen our teams and our product. The foundation of our diversity efforts are closely tied to our core values, which include “Playing Well With Others” and “Authenticity.”

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.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities in our job application process. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at accommodations-recruiting@yelp.com or 1-415-969-8488.

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.

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