Carmen Amara

Chief People Officer Yelp

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Carmen Amara is Chief People Officer of Yelp, the local business review platform, a role she has held since joining the company in 2022. Her tenure is defined by one decision above all others: Yelp closed its offices during the pandemic and, unlike most of its peers, never reopened them as a requirement. Amara has been the executive responsible for making that model work and for defending it publicly, and she has consistently framed it as an evidence-based choice rather than an ideological one — the company kept measuring employee sentiment and recruiting outcomes and kept finding that remote-first won. She is a Section 16 reporting officer of Yelp Inc., and brings more than twenty years in human resources, built at eBay and The Home Depot before Yelp.

Career Highlights

• Chief People Officer of Yelp since 2022, leading People Operations for a fully distributed public company.
• Owns and defends Yelp’s permanent remote-first model, one of the few large consumer internet companies to commit to it rather than reverse course, and has argued the case publicly on the basis of the company’s own employee data.
• Yelp has reported a roughly 43 per cent increase in job application rates following the shift to remote work — a recruiting-funnel effect that became a central part of the company’s argument for the policy.
• Files Forms 4 with the SEC as an officer of Yelp Inc. under the title Chief People Officer, with a continuous record from February 2024 through September 2026.
• Previously Vice President of Global People Operations and Development at eBay, running people operations at global scale.
• Earlier, a Human Resources Director at The Home Depot, providing strategic direction across operational and corporate functions — a very different workforce from technology, and a frontline retail one.
• Named to Women We Admire’s Top 50 Women Leaders of Austin for 2026, and a recurring speaker on distributed work and empathetic leadership, including at the Running Remote conference.

Professional Journey

Amara’s career began away from technology, in one of the largest and most operationally demanding workforces in the United States. As a Human Resources Director at The Home Depot she gave strategic direction across operational and corporate functions, working with a workforce that is hourly, in-person and distributed across thousands of physical stores — an environment in which HR policy has immediate operational consequences.

She then moved into technology at eBay, becoming Vice President of Global People Operations and Development. The scope there was global and the problems were those of a large, mature internet company: consistency of practice across many countries, and the development pipeline for a workforce that had long since stopped being a startup.

Yelp recruited her in 2022 to lead People Operations, at precisely the moment the question of where work happens became the central issue in her profession. Yelp had gone remote during the pandemic and, rather than treating that as temporary, chose to make it permanent. That choice put Amara in an unusual position: instead of managing a return-to-office programme, as most of her peers were doing, she had to build the infrastructure for a company that would never gather in one place again — hiring, onboarding, development, compensation and culture, all without offices as a default container.

She has been the public face of that argument, appearing on podcasts and at conferences such as Running Remote to make the case that the decision was data-led. Yelp’s reported 43 per cent rise in job application rates after the shift became the most cited evidence for it. Her Form 4 filings with the SEC run continuously through September 2026, confirming she remains in the role. One point of record worth noting: she filed with the SEC as Carmen Orr until May 2024 and as Carmen Amara since, so her earlier filings appear under the former name.

Education

Colby College

B.A., Spanish and International Relations

Bentley University

M.B.A., International Business

She also holds an Executive Coaching certification through Columbia University. This is a professional certification rather than a degree and is recorded as such.