December 10, 2020 by Jazlyn Akaka and Pravinth Vethanayagam

About this event

Yelp’s mission is to connect people with great local businesses, and one of the teams working behind the scenes to make that happen is our five star engineering and product teams.

Playing an active role in our community is a value that we have strongly prioritized over the years. Typically we would invite you to come to Yelp’s HQ to network, grab a slice of ‘za, and learn about the technology and culture behind Yelp. With stay-at-home orders across the globe, Yelp (like many of you) has had no choice but to adapt to these changes. We understand that this is a strange and challenging time for many, so we’d like to invite you to join us as we navigate this new normal for the tech community together.

To stay connected, create space for folks to collaborate and share some of the things Yelp has been working on, we are launching our very own virtual tech talk series. This series of talks will feature Yelpers from engineering and product and will focus on themes such as career development, technical skills, workplace challenges and Yelp’s response to COVID-19.

Talk: Dynamic Data in the Time of COVID-19

Have you ever wondered how Yelp keeps the most critical data up to date through COVID-19? In this talk we'll let you know how we managed to gather information about businesses and surface them. Join us to learn more about our approach to providing users with the most current information about local businesses.

Speakers:

Jazlyn Akaka: Jazlyn joined Yelp about one year ago as a full-stack engineer on the Reader Experience team where she has worked on building out features to further improve the business details page. She is now working on the Services Calls Experience team and has enjoyed working alongside talented teammates on high impact projects. She recently earned her master's degree in computer science through Georgia Tech's OMSCS program. Prior to joining Yelp, she worked as a senior software engineer at GE Digital. In her free time she tends to her sourdough starter and enjoys exploring new recipes.

Pravinth Vethanayagam: Pravinth joined Yelp as a machine learning engineer on the Semantic Business Information team where he worked on photo models, reviews and other business data. His team and him are now working on keeping data at Yelp current so that users always have the right information when connecting with businesses. Before his stint at Yelp, Pravinth was a fellow at Insight Data Science where he worked on 3D generative models to generate furniture models. During the pandemic, Pravinth has been actively updating his SciFi trivia and would appreciate any new SciFi recommendations.

Moderator:

Rafaella Brozou: Rafaella joined Yelp in October 2019 as a technical recruiter. Before joining Yelp, she completed her MSc in Human Resource Management and worked in the HR-Recruitment industry for three years in her home-country Greece. She is currently working from Hamburg supporting the needs of the EU Engineering Recruiting team. During her time at Yelp she’s been engaged in a wide range of tasks including recruitment, sourcing and coordination of university fairs. What initially attracted her to Yelp was the diverse and collaborative culture along with the focus on being authentic and bringing your real self to work. In her free time, she enjoys cooking and baking, walking with her dog in nature and travelling to new destinations.