What is a Data Analyst at Yelp?

At Yelp, a Data Analyst is more than just a number-cruncher; you are a strategic partner who helps connect millions of users with great local businesses. In this role, you act as the compass for product, engineering, and sales teams, translating vast amounts of user interaction data into actionable insights. Whether you are optimizing ad delivery algorithms, analyzing user retention on the mobile app, or evaluating the health of the local business ecosystem, your work directly influences the company’s bottom line and user experience.

The role demands a unique blend of technical precision and product intuition. You will tackle complex questions about user behavior—such as why a specific cohort is churning or how a new feature impacts engagement—and present your findings to stakeholders who rely on your clarity to make decisions. You are not just reporting on what happened; you are uncovering why it happened and predicting what should happen next.

Working at Yelp means dealing with data at a massive scale. You will likely be aligned with specific verticals such as Business Operations (BizOps), Product Analytics, or Revenue Strategy. Regardless of the team, your contributions will help shape a platform that empowers consumers and supports local economies, making this one of the most impactful roles within the organization.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparation for the Data Analyst role requires a balanced focus on technical execution and business logic. You should approach your preparation not just by memorizing syntax, but by practicing how to apply data tools to solve real-world business problems.

The hiring team evaluates candidates based on four primary criteria:

Technical Proficiency You must demonstrate the ability to extract and manipulate data efficiently. For Yelp, this primarily means strong SQL skills (expect complex joins and window functions) and potentially Excel or Python, depending on the specific team (e.g., BizOps often leans heavily on Excel modeling).

Product Sense & Metric Definition Interviews will test your ability to define success. You need to understand Yelp’s ecosystem—users, business owners, and advertisers—and be able to propose the right metrics (KPIs) to measure the health of a product or feature.

Analytical Execution This refers to how you structure ambiguous problems. When asked why a metric dropped or how to value a market opportunity, you are evaluated on your logical framework, your hypothesis generation, and how you sanity-check your results.

Communication & Culture Yelp values authenticity and clear communication. You will be assessed on your ability to explain complex technical findings to non-technical partners and your alignment with Yelp’s values of tenacity and playing well with others.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a Data Analyst at Yelp is rigorous but structured to give you ample opportunity to showcase your strengths. It typically moves from a high-level assessment of your background to deep-dive technical and case study rounds. The philosophy behind the process is collaborative problem solving; interviewers want to see how you think in real-time and how you handle feedback.

Expect the process to begin with a recruiter screen, followed by a technical screen which often serves as a filter for core skills. Depending on the team (e.g., BizOps vs. Product Data), this initial technical step might be a live SQL coding session or a timed Excel take-home assessment. If you pass this stage, you will move to a virtual onsite loop. The onsite is intense, usually consisting of 3–4 back-to-back rounds covering technical skills, product cases, and behavioral questions.

Unlike some companies that focus purely on getting the "right" answer, Yelp interviewers often emphasize the journey to the solution. They appreciate candidates who ask clarifying questions, state their assumptions upfront, and iterate on their answers. The pace is fast, so time management during case studies and coding rounds is critical.

This timeline illustrates the standard progression from your first application to the final offer. Use this to plan your study schedule: ensure your SQL and Excel skills are sharp before the technical screen, and reserve your deep product case study practice for the days leading up to the onsite. Note that the "Technical Screen" format may vary (Live vs. Take-home) based on the specific analyst role.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed, you must prepare for specific evaluation modules. Based on candidate reports, Yelp focuses heavily on your practical ability to query data and your strategic ability to interpret it.

SQL and Data Manipulation

This is the bread and butter of the interview. You will be expected to write clean, efficient queries to solve business questions.

• Why it matters: You cannot analyze data you cannot access.
• How it is evaluated: You will likely use a shared coding environment (like CoderPad). Speed and syntax accuracy matter, but logic is paramount.
• Strong performance: Writing queries that handle edge cases (e.g., NULL values), using window functions (RANK, LEAD, LAG) correctly, and optimizing for performance.

Be ready to go over:

• Joins and Filtering: Inner vs. Left joins and complex WHERE clauses.
• Aggregations: GROUP BY, HAVING, and calculating rates/percentages.
• Window Functions: Calculating running totals or identifying top N items per category.
• Advanced concepts: Self-joins and handling timestamps/date manipulation.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Write a query to find the top 3 reviewed businesses in each city for the last month."
• "Calculate the month-over-month retention rate for users who signed up in January."
• "Identify users who have written reviews on three consecutive days."

Product Sense and Metrics

This area tests your understanding of Yelp’s business model. You will be given a hypothetical scenario and asked to drive strategy.

• Why it matters: Analysts must ensure teams are chasing the right goals.
• How it is evaluated: Open-ended case studies where you define KPIs and investigate trends.
• Strong performance: structured thinking (User -> Action -> Metric), distinguishing between vanity metrics and actionable metrics, and considering trade-offs (e.g., ad revenue vs. user experience).

Be ready to go over:

• Metric Selection: Choosing the "North Star" metric for a feature.
• Root Cause Analysis: Diagnosing why a key metric (like CTR or Churn) changed.
• Experimentation: Basics of A/B testing, sample size, and significance.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Yelp is launching a new 'Request a Quote' feature. How would you measure its success?"
• "The number of daily reviews posted dropped by 10% yesterday. How would you investigate?"
• "We want to increase ad revenue without hurting user retention. What metrics do we track?"

Analytical Execution (BizOps / Excel focus)

For roles closer to Business Operations, the focus shifts slightly toward financial modeling and operational efficiency.

• Why it matters: Validating the financial viability of business decisions.
• How it is evaluated: Often a take-home Excel assignment or a live modeling case.
• Strong performance: Clean, auditable Excel models, use of VLOOKUP/INDEX-MATCH, and pivot tables to summarize large datasets quickly.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Here is a dataset of sales rep performance. Calculate the commission payout based on this tiered structure."
• "Model the potential revenue impact of changing our subscription pricing tiers."

The word cloud above highlights the most frequently discussed concepts in Yelp Data Analyst interviews. Notice the prominence of SQL, Metrics, Product, and Communication. This indicates that while technical skills are the entry ticket, your ability to apply those skills to Product problems and Communicate the results is what will ultimately get you hired.

Key Responsibilities

As a Data Analyst at Yelp, your day-to-day work is a mix of reactive investigation and proactive strategy. You are responsible for maintaining the "source of truth" for your team. This involves building and maintaining dashboards (often in Tableau or Looker) that track the health of products, ensuring that stakeholders have real-time access to critical data.

You will collaborate closely with Product Managers and Engineers. When a Product Manager wants to launch a new feature, you are the partner who helps design the A/B test, determines the sample size, and eventually analyzes the results to recommend a "Go/No-Go" decision. You act as a safeguard against bad data leading to bad product decisions.

Beyond product work, you will drive strategic deep dives. You might be asked to analyze the long-term value (LTV) of different user segments or identify opportunities to improve the onboarding flow for business owners. These projects require you to pull messy data, clean it, model it, and package your findings into a narrative that persuades leadership to take action.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be competitive for this role, you need a specific toolkit. Yelp looks for candidates who can hit the ground running technically while growing into strategic leaders.

• Technical Skills:

  • SQL: Non-negotiable. You must be fluent in writing complex queries from scratch.
  • Visualization: Experience with tools like Tableau, Looker, or PowerBI to create self-service dashboards.
  • Excel/Sheets: Advanced proficiency (Pivot tables, VLOOKUPs) is essential, especially for BizOps-aligned roles.
  • Python/R: Often listed as a "nice-to-have" for general analysts but becomes a "must-have" for Data Science Analyst roles.

• Experience Level:

  • Typically requires 1–3 years of relevant experience in analytics, business intelligence, or a quantitative field.
  • A background in math, statistics, computer science, or economics is preferred.

• Soft Skills:

  • Stakeholder Management: The ability to push back on requests that don't align with business goals.
  • Curiosity: A genuine desire to understand user behavior and the "why" behind the data.

• Must-have vs. Nice-to-have:

  • Must-have: SQL fluency, metric definition, analytical problem solving.
  • Nice-to-have: Experience with A/B testing frameworks, knowledge of the local advertising market, Python scripting.

Common Interview Questions

The following questions are representative of what you might face. They are drawn from candidate data and reflect Yelp’s emphasis on practical application over theory.

Technical & SQL

These questions test your raw coding ability.

• "Given a table of user_reviews and business_checkins, find the top 5 users who have checked in but never written a review."
• "Write a query to calculate the daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) ratio for the past year."
• "How would you handle duplicate rows in a dataset before performing an aggregation?"
• "Write a query to find the median duration of a user session."

Product Sense & Metrics

These questions test your business intuition.

• "We noticed that user engagement on the iOS app is higher than on Android. Why might that be, and how would you verify it?"
• "If we increase the number of ads shown on search result pages, how will that affect user retention?"
• "Define a 'churned' user for Yelp. Why did you choose that definition?"
• "How would you measure the success of a feature that allows users to book appointments directly through Yelp?"

Behavioral & Culture

These questions test your fit with the team.

• "Tell me about a time you had to explain a complex data finding to a non-technical stakeholder who didn't understand it."
• "Describe a situation where your analysis contradicted the Product Manager’s intuition. How did you handle it?"
• "Tell me about a time you had to prioritize multiple conflicting deadlines."

These questions are based on real interview experiences from candidates who interviewed at this company. You can practice answering them interactively on Dataford to better prepare for your interview.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult is the SQL assessment? The SQL assessment is generally considered intermediate to advanced. You won't just be doing SELECT *. Expect to use joins, subqueries, and window functions. For BizOps roles, the Excel assessment can be time-pressured, so practice your speed.

Q: What is the difference between Data Analyst and Data Science Analyst at Yelp? "Data Analyst" roles often focus more on business insights, dashboarding, and SQL/Excel. "Data Science Analyst" roles typically require stronger statistical knowledge, Python/R coding skills, and a deeper focus on predictive modeling or complex experimentation logic.

Q: Does Yelp offer remote roles? Yes, Yelp has embraced a "Yelp Anywhere" remote-first model for many of its corporate roles. However, you should confirm specific location requirements (or time zone expectations) with your recruiter early in the process.

Q: How much domain knowledge of Yelp is required? While you don't need to know insider numbers, you must understand the product from a user perspective. You should be familiar with how users find businesses, how businesses make money (ads), and the general ecosystem of reviews and photos.

Other General Tips

Use the App Critically Before your interview, spend time using Yelp as both a user and (if possible) look at the business owner portal. Notice features that seem new or underutilized. When you can reference specific product flows during a case study (e.g., "When I use the 'Collections' feature..."), it shows you have done your homework and possess genuine product interest.

Think in "Trade-offs" Yelp is a marketplace with three sides: Users, Businesses, and Advertisers. A change that benefits one might hurt another. For example, showing more ads helps revenue and businesses but might annoy users. Explicitly mentioning these trade-offs during your interview demonstrates high-level strategic thinking.

Clarify Before You Code In the technical rounds, never jump straight into writing code. Read the prompt, ask clarifying questions (e.g., "Can a user have multiple sessions in one day?"), and explain your logic out loud. Interviewers often give hints if they see you planning a solution that might run into a dead end.

Prepare for "Ambiguity" Yelp interview questions are often intentionally vague (e.g., "Revenue is down. Why?"). Do not panic. Break the problem down systematically: Is it a data error? Is it a seasonal trend? Is it a competitor? Is it a specific platform (iOS vs. Web)? Show your detective work.

Summary & Next Steps

Becoming a Data Analyst at Yelp is an opportunity to work at the intersection of community, data, and product. The role offers a unique chance to influence how millions of people experience their local neighborhoods. If you enjoy digging into complex datasets to find the narrative hidden within, this role is a fantastic career platform.

To maximize your chances, focus your preparation on SQL fluency and product metrics. Practice querying datasets until the syntax feels second nature, and spend time deconstructing the Yelp app to understand its business drivers. Remember, the interviewers are looking for a future colleague who is curious, tenacious, and capable of turning data into direction.

The salary data above provides a baseline for compensation expectations. Note that total compensation at Yelp typically includes base salary, restricted stock units (RSUs), and potential bonuses. These figures can vary significantly based on your location (due to the remote-first policy) and your level of experience.

You have the roadmap. Now, dive into the data, sharpen your SQL, and get ready to show the team why you are the right person to help Yelp connect people with great local businesses. Good luck!