What is a Security Engineer at Yelp?

As a Security Engineer at Yelp, you are the primary defender of a platform that connects millions of users with great local businesses every day. Because Yelp operates at a massive scale, handling vast amounts of user data, reviews, and transaction details, your work directly impacts user trust and the company's core business model. You will not just be finding vulnerabilities; you will be building the resilient infrastructure and automated guardrails that prevent them.

This role, frequently structured as a Software Engineer - Infrastructure Security, sits at the critical intersection of software engineering, cloud architecture, and cybersecurity. You will work closely with product and infrastructure teams to design secure systems from the ground up, rather than just auditing them after the fact. Your influence will span across Yelp’s microservices, deployment pipelines, and cloud environments, ensuring that security scales seamlessly with the engineering organization.

Expect a highly collaborative environment where your engineering skills are just as important as your security knowledge. You will be tasked with solving complex, ambiguous problems related to identity and access management, container security, and network defenses. If you are passionate about writing code to automate security and protecting high-traffic distributed systems, this role offers an exceptional platform to make a tangible impact.

Common Interview Questions

The questions below represent the types of challenges you will face during your Yelp interviews. While you should not memorize answers, you should use these to understand the patterns of evaluation and practice structuring your responses clearly.

Infrastructure & Cloud Security

These questions test your practical knowledge of securing modern cloud environments and distributed systems.

• How do you secure a Kubernetes cluster from a malicious internal actor?
• Explain the concept of least privilege and how you would implement it in an AWS multi-account environment.
• What are the security implications of using a public S3 bucket, and how can you automate the prevention of this misconfiguration?
• Walk me through the steps you would take to secure a newly deployed AWS VPC.
• How do you manage and rotate secrets in a microservices architecture?

Coding & Automation

These questions evaluate your software engineering fundamentals and your ability to build security tooling.

• Write a function in Python or Go to validate if a given string is a properly formatted and secure URL.
• Given a log file containing thousands of authentication attempts, write a script to find the top 5 IPs with the most failed logins.
• How would you design a system to automatically scan all new GitHub pull requests for hardcoded AWS keys?
• Implement a basic rate-limiting algorithm for an API endpoint.
• Review this block of code and identify any potential security vulnerabilities (e.g., SQL injection, path traversal).

Threat Modeling & System Design

These questions assess your ability to look at the big picture and identify structural vulnerabilities.

• Threat model a password reset feature for a consumer-facing web application.
• Design a secure architecture for a service that processes and stores user credit card information.
• How would you design a centralized logging and monitoring system for a distributed engineering organization?
• What are the primary security risks associated with a microservices architecture compared to a monolith?
• If Yelp wanted to build a new feature allowing users to message businesses directly, how would you secure that communication channel?

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for the Security Engineer interview at Yelp requires a balanced approach. You must demonstrate deep domain expertise in security while also proving you can write clean code and design scalable infrastructure.

Interviewers will evaluate you against several key criteria:

Infrastructure & Cloud Security Knowledge – This evaluates your understanding of securing modern, cloud-native environments. Interviewers will look for your ability to secure AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, and CI/CD pipelines. You can demonstrate strength here by discussing specific, scalable security controls you have implemented in previous roles.

Coding and Automation – Yelp expects its security professionals to be strong engineers. You will be evaluated on your ability to write reliable, maintainable code (typically in Python, Go, or Java) to automate security tasks and build internal tooling. Strong candidates will approach these rounds just like a standard software engineering interview, focusing on optimal data structures and clean logic.

System Design and Threat Modeling – This criterion tests your ability to look at a complex, distributed architecture and identify potential attack vectors. Interviewers want to see how you balance strict security requirements with engineering velocity and system reliability. You can excel by methodically breaking down a system, identifying threats, and proposing pragmatic, defense-in-depth mitigations.

Culture and Values Alignment – Yelp places a massive emphasis on collaboration, unblocking peers, and protecting the user. You will be evaluated on how you communicate complex security concepts to non-security engineers. Demonstrating empathy, a collaborative mindset, and a focus on practical solutions will strongly differentiate you.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a Security Engineer at Yelp is designed to be rigorous, practical, and highly interactive. It typically begins with a recruiter phone screen to align on your background, expectations, and basic role fit. If successful, you will move on to a technical phone interview. This initial technical screen usually involves a mix of fundamental security concept questions and a live coding exercise, ensuring you possess the baseline engineering skills required for the role.

Following the phone screen, you will be invited to a comprehensive virtual onsite interview loop. This onsite typically consists of four to five distinct rounds, each focusing on a different core competency. You can expect dedicated sessions for infrastructure security deep-dives, a system design and threat modeling round, an additional coding or automation interview, and a behavioral round focused on your past experiences and alignment with Yelp’s culture.

Yelp’s interviewing philosophy heavily favors practical application over rote memorization. Interviewers want to see how you tackle real-world engineering problems and how you collaborate when you get stuck. The atmosphere is generally conversational and supportive, reflecting Yelp's strong internal culture of mentorship and teamwork.

This visual timeline outlines the typical progression of the Yelp interview process, from the initial recruiter screen through the onsite loop. You should use this to pace your preparation, ensuring you are ready for both the hands-on coding aspects early in the process and the broader architectural discussions during the onsite phase. Note that specific rounds may vary slightly depending on the exact team (e.g., Application Security vs. Infrastructure Security).

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed in the Security Engineer interviews, you need to master several core technical and behavioral domains. Yelp’s process is comprehensive, so your preparation should be equally thorough.

Infrastructure and Cloud Security

Because Yelp relies heavily on cloud infrastructure, your ability to secure these environments is paramount. Interviewers will test your practical knowledge of cloud service providers, primarily AWS, and how to configure them securely at scale. A strong performance involves moving beyond basic configurations to discuss automated enforcement and least-privilege architectures.

Be ready to go over:

• Identity and Access Management (IAM) – Understanding how to design scalable role-based access control, manage cross-account permissions, and prevent privilege escalation.
• Container and Orchestration Security – Securing Docker containers and Kubernetes clusters, including network policies, secrets management, and secure base images.
• Network Security – Designing secure VPC architectures, utilizing security groups, and implementing robust logging and monitoring.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Multi-region high-availability security architectures, advanced AWS KMS implementations, and custom IAM policy evaluation logic.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "How would you design a secure CI/CD pipeline for deploying a new microservice to a Kubernetes cluster?"
• "Explain how you would restrict access to an internal S3 bucket containing sensitive user data so that only a specific application can read it."
• "Walk me through how you would detect and respond to compromised AWS credentials."

Coding and Automation

Yelp treats its Security Engineers as Software Engineers first and foremost. You will face standard algorithmic coding rounds, often focusing on data manipulation, string parsing, or building a small automated tool. Strong candidates write clean, well-documented code and communicate their thought process clearly throughout the exercise.

Be ready to go over:

• Scripting and Tool Development – Writing scripts in Python or Go to parse logs, interact with APIs, or automate a security check.
• Data Structures and Algorithms – Demonstrating proficiency with hash maps, arrays, strings, and basic graph traversal, typically at a LeetCode Easy to Medium level.
• Code Review – Identifying security flaws (like injection vulnerabilities or hardcoded secrets) and performance bottlenecks in existing code snippets.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Building scalable, asynchronous security event processors or interacting with low-level system APIs.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Write a script to parse a large web server log file and identify IP addresses that are exhibiting brute-force login behavior."
• "Given a list of internal API endpoints and their required permission scopes, write a function to determine if a specific user token has access."
• "Review this Python code snippet and point out both the security vulnerabilities and the performance inefficiencies."

System Design and Threat Modeling

This area evaluates your architectural thinking and your ability to anticipate how attackers might abuse a system. You will likely be asked to design a system (or review an existing Yelp-like architecture) and then systematically model the threats against it. A strong candidate leads the discussion, categorizes risks clearly, and proposes realistic mitigations.

Be ready to go over:

• Architecture Fundamentals – Understanding load balancers, databases, caching layers, and how data flows through a modern microservices architecture.
• Threat Modeling Methodologies – Applying frameworks like STRIDE to systematically identify spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, and elevation of privilege.
• Defense in Depth – Layering security controls at the network, application, and data levels so that the failure of one control does not compromise the entire system.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Designing secure multi-tenant architectures or building custom cryptographic key management systems.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a secure system for storing and processing Yelp user reviews, ensuring data integrity and preventing spam."
• "Let's threat model a new feature that allows users to upload photos of local business receipts. What are the primary risks, and how do we mitigate them?"
• "How would you design an internal authentication service that handles thousands of requests per second with minimal latency?"

Key Responsibilities

As a Security Engineer at Yelp, your day-to-day work revolves around building the paved roads that make secure development the easiest path for engineering teams. You will spend a significant portion of your time writing code, developing internal security tools, and automating infrastructure guardrails using tools like Terraform and AWS native services. Rather than acting as a gatekeeper, you will operate as an enabler, ensuring that security scales seamlessly with Yelp’s rapid deployment cycles.

Collaboration is a massive part of this role. You will frequently partner with infrastructure, platform, and product engineering teams to provide security guidance during the design phase of new features. This involves leading threat modeling sessions, reviewing architecture proposals, and helping teams understand the security implications of their technical choices. Your goal is to build a culture of security awareness across the organization.

Additionally, you will be responsible for continuous monitoring and incident response. You will build and tune detection mechanisms to identify anomalous behavior within Yelp’s cloud environments. When an incident occurs, you will help lead the investigation, mitigate the immediate threat, and drive the post-mortem process to ensure systemic vulnerabilities are permanently addressed.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be a competitive candidate for the Security Engineer position at Yelp, you must demonstrate a strong blend of software engineering capabilities and deep security domain knowledge. The ideal candidate has experience operating in large-scale, cloud-native environments and understands the nuances of securing distributed systems.

Must-have skills:

• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language, such as Python, Go, Java, or C++, with a strong ability to write production-ready code.
• Deep, practical knowledge of cloud security principles, specifically within Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Solid understanding of network security, applied cryptography, and identity and access management (IAM).
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex security risks to non-technical stakeholders.

Nice-to-have skills:

• Hands-on experience securing containerized environments and orchestration platforms, particularly Kubernetes.
• Background in building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines and integrating automated security testing (SAST/DAST).
• Prior experience participating in security incident response or digital forensics.
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks (e.g., PCI-DSS, SOC2) and how to implement technical controls to satisfy them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult are the coding rounds for a Security Engineer at Yelp? The coding rounds are generally calibrated to a standard Software Engineer level, typically focusing on LeetCode Easy to Medium problems. Yelp expects you to be a capable developer who can automate tasks and build tools, so you should be comfortable writing clean, bug-free code in your language of choice.

Q: What is the work-life balance and culture like for this team? Yelp is widely known for having an excellent engineering culture that highly values work-life balance. The environment is highly collaborative, and burnout is actively managed by leadership. You can expect a supportive atmosphere where mentorship is encouraged and your time outside of work is respected.

Q: How much preparation time is typical for this interview process? Most successful candidates spend 3 to 5 weeks preparing. You should divide your time evenly between practicing coding algorithms, reviewing AWS/cloud security fundamentals, and practicing verbal threat modeling of common architectural patterns.

Q: Does Yelp require Security Engineers to be in the office? Yelp has adopted a highly flexible, remote-first approach for many of its engineering roles. While there are physical offices available for collaboration, many Security Engineers work remotely. Be sure to clarify the specific location expectations for your exact team with your recruiter during the initial screen.

Other General Tips

• Think like an engineer, not an auditor: Yelp wants security professionals who build solutions. When discussing vulnerabilities, always immediately pivot to how you would engineer a scalable, automated fix rather than just writing a policy about it.
• Communicate your threat models out loud: During system design rounds, do not just silently draw on a whiteboard. Verbally categorize the threats (e.g., "I'm concerned about data exfiltration here...") and explain your rationale for prioritizing certain mitigations over others.

• Know the Yelp product: Be prepared to discuss how security impacts the Yelp user experience. Understanding the business context—such as the importance of review integrity and protecting local business data—will make your system design answers much stronger.
• Master your language of choice: Whether you choose Python, Go, or Java, know its standard libraries intimately. You will not have time to look up basic syntax during the live coding rounds, so ensure your foundational programming muscle memory is sharp.

Summary & Next Steps

Interviewing for a Security Engineer role at Yelp is a challenging but incredibly rewarding process. You are applying for a position that sits at the very heart of Yelp’s engineering organization, tasked with protecting the data and trust of millions of users and local businesses. The role demands a unique hybrid of deep security intuition and robust software engineering skills, offering you the chance to build highly impactful, scalable security infrastructure.

This compensation module provides a baseline understanding of what you might expect regarding salary and total compensation for this role. Keep in mind that exact figures will vary based on your specific seniority level, geographic location, and the outcome of your interview performance. Use this data to set realistic expectations and inform your negotiations once you reach the offer stage.

To succeed, focus your preparation on mastering cloud security fundamentals, sharpening your coding and automation skills, and practicing structured threat modeling. Remember that Yelp is looking for collaborative problem-solvers who can communicate complex risks clearly and build practical solutions. Approach your interviews with confidence, knowing that a methodical, engineering-first mindset will set you apart. For more detailed insights, practice problems, and peer experiences, continue exploring resources on Dataford. You have the skills to excel—now it is time to showcase them.