Yelp Engineering and Product

Lina Lee, Machine Learning Engineer; Nelson Lee, Engineering Manager

May 27, 2026

The Evolution of Support: From Fixed Phrases to Conversation At Yelp, delivering responsive and accurate customer support is a core priority. For years, our legacy Customer Success (CS) Chatbot provided support by guiding users through a static support experience. Users either navigated a 2-step menu tree or typed a query that was matched against a fixed set of phrases to retrieve an answer. While functional, the legacy chatbot had a key limitation: its reliance on rigid matching meant that if a query didn’t fit the menu structure or precisely match a known phrase, the user wouldn’t be able to get...

Nick Del Nano, Data Streaming

May 21, 2026

Introduction In large analytics environments, data teams often struggle to answer deceptively simple questions, like who their stakeholders are and how their data is being used. At Yelp, we address this by visualizing access patterns, plotting time-based partition key values against access event timestamps. These visualizations reveal distinct usage signatures – ad hoc queries, daily batch jobs, and periodic backfills – allowing data owners to understand their stakeholders and use cases. This deeper insight into data usage has enabled high-impact platform initiatives including migrating thousands of tables to Apache Iceberg format and identifying storage efficiencies which reduced the cost of...