March 29, 2022 by Salman Masood

Talk Summary: Leading a project can be very stressful. It involves a lot of planning, decision-making, communication, mentoring, and many other skills to be executed efficiently. It is also essential to know the process needed for successfully leading a project. Sometimes we even have different situations like teammates in different time zones, transfer of ownership, estimation for new team members, etc. that add an extra layer of complexity. It is always good to know the best practices and prepare ahead. Join us as Salman, a Yelp engineer, talks about his experience with leading various projects and tackling different complex scenarios.

Speaker: Salman Masood

Salman is a software engineer in the Commerce Platform. He has been at Yelp for four years and is currently based in San Francisco. He was born and raised in India, and moved to the U.S. for his master’s from Stony Brook University. Eventually he started his first job in the U.S. with Yelp. Salman is passionate about leading projects, documentation and mentorship, and has acquired a lot of experience by leading many successful projects. He also recently helped many new team members onboard at Yelp. Outside of work, he loves to play all kinds of outdoor sports including tennis, cricket and volleyball.

Moderator: Soorya Krishna Pillai

Soorya is an engineering manager for the Analytics Infrastructure Team at Yelp. She’s been with Yelp for four years. She led Awesome Women in Engineering’s (AWE) Reads program for three years and is now the Safe Spaces Vertical Lead. Prior to Yelp, Soorya was an Assistant Professor for Computer Applications master’s program at the University of Mumbai. Because of her background in academics, Soorya is passionate about continuous improvement for her and her team.

About Yelping From Home:

Yelp’s mission is to connect people with great local businesses, and two of the teams working behind the scenes to make that happen are 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 Yelp employees from engineering and product share their stories about career development, technical skills and workplace challenges in a well-distributed environment.