betterment software engineer interview betterment software engineer interview

In this post, well dive into some of the engineering that took place to build RetireGuide and our strategy for building an accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use advice tool that implements sophisticated financial calculations. Im going to walk you through how we got there. Unfortunately, if it were so simple we wouldnt be here, several paragraphs into a blog post on the topic. For a basic example, you generally wont need to save a record to the database to test a validation. Controllers should pass ActiveRecord models, rather than ids, into the model layer. We want them to be able to work without an internet connection, and if we do want to integrate with a real service in local development, we should be able to do thatmeaning we should be able to test and integrate locally at will, without having to rely on cumbersome, extra-connected services (think Docker, Kubernetes; anything that pairs cloud features with the local environment.) Those are stored in a file named .coach/datadog_monitors.yml and look like this: monitors: - type: metric metric: "coach.ci_notification_sent.completed.95percentile" name: "coach.ci_notification_sent.completed.95percentile SLO" aggregate: max owner: sre alert_time_aggr: on_average alert_period: last_5m alert_comparison: above alert_threshold: 5500 - type: apm name: "Pull Requests API endpoint violating SLO" resource_name: api::v1::pullrequestscontroller_show max_response_time: 900ms service_name: coach page: false slack: false It wasnt simple to make this abstraction intuitive between a Datadog monitor configuration and a user interface. Here Id like to discuss some philosophical approaches to defining SLOs, explain how they help with prioritization, and outline the tooling currently available to Betterment Engineers to make this process a little easier. So stripping out all non-trading data was the key to focusing on the right things to test for this project. We might take a look at the metrics were using (the SLIs), the failures that chipped away at our target goal, and, if necessary, re-evaluate the relevancy of what were measuring. We like to evaluate how well a candidate explains the design decisions and progress from one interviewer to the next. Finally, these tests effectiveness is directly related to how we can apply them to reality, so we need to be simplewe want to be able to test and build features without connections to other features. Sounds simple enough! That's what we do here at Betterment, come join us! Now, updating CI requires opening a PR to make the change. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? What to say when thingsfail This is what engineers would see in the Old World when tests failed for an open pull request: Among other deficiencies, theres only one link and it takes us to a Jenkins job. Therefore our objective function becomes, a1a2a3a4d6d7 And expressing that with numpy is pretty painless: numpy.sum(x)*1.0 Bounds Bounds make sure that we dont take more than any one ingredient than the store has in stock. I moved to Nashville to study songwriting and music business, and started a small label through which I released my bands album. Do no harm to others' work At Betterment, we are constantly pushing through new features and enhancements, some visible to customers, but many not. Im Jesse, a recruiter here at Betterment, and I had the immense pleasure of working closely with these two. Most teams need to deploy to multiple environments: production, staging, feature branches, sales demos, etc. Normally wed consider opting out of security analysis to be an unsafe thing to do, but we actually like the way RuboCop handles this because it can help reduce some code review effort; the first solution eliminates the vulnerable-looking pattern (even if it wasnt a vulnerability to begin with) while the second one signals to reviewers that they should confirm this code is actually safe (making it easy to pinpoint areas of focus). Wanting to save more for his retirement, he decided to open up a Betterment taxable account, which he funded with an additional $11,000. We want to minimize the hops and jumps required to figure out what were granting access to, so we make sure that it all happens in the controller. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. See a demo of how it works. When an input or an assumption changes, it should be as easy as re-running the whole thing. Do we try to get that extra 9 in our target - or do we use the time to take some creative risks with the product (feature-flagged, of course)? For this example, well say were most interested in testing the profile information edit flows to start. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. I applied through a recruiter. Well, we aim to find an affordable, maintainable spot on that testing spectrum a la Justin Searls' advice. Weve explored two new rules to encourage best practices when it comes to authorization in our application controllers: Authorization should happen in the controller and should emerge naturally from table relationships originating from the authenticated user, i.e. Prior to Betterment, I only had experience with super small codebases that I built myself or with friends. Basically give intros, talk about your experience and what youre looking for. In this video, I conduct a mock Google coding interview with a normal software engineer, Keerti Purswani, who's a software developer based in India. On Fishbowl, you can share insights and advice anonymously with Betterment employees and get real answers from people on the inside. I interviewed at Betterment. 1) Phone screen about the company Our dashboards come in a few parts. As a Rails shop, we already make heavy use of RuboCop. For example, one Airflow task may write a file and a subsequent task may need to email the file from the dependent task ran on another machine. internal services) we have full control over how we build them, so using HTTP and REST is no issue. If youve read this far, wed encourage you to take the leap and test out the delayed gem for yourself! Meet Joe Joe is a hypothetical Betterment customer. Magic ) is only a few lines of code. Any questions for me? Handle a few basic cases and be done with them. Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401 (k) for small and medium-sized businesses. Otherwise, wed be putting a sweet new set of tires on a car that wont start! Once a new registration event is received, the registry server opens a pull request to the Julia registry. At Betterment, we definitely prefer to be closer to the 100% coverage end of the spectrum, but we know that in practice that's not really a feasible end state if we want to ship changes quickly and deliver rapid feedback to our engineers about their proposed changes. We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. I just got a developer job at Facebook. Here's how I prepped for my Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. Interactive elements, some delightful animations, and other frontend behaviors still need it. What is an SLO? Allow folks outside of the SRE team to contribute to CI. Glassdoor has millions of jobs plus salary information, company reviews, and interview questions from people on the inside making it easy to find a job thats right for you. The benefit we found in flutter_driver was that we could run it in our production-like environment against preset test users. 30 min recruiter screen - talk about your experience and why you are a good fit Asking for someones name is simple, but full of assumptions. Ive always had a curious mind. What could happen if we dont escapecontent? Interviewers were professional throughout. At Betterment, instead of picking pounds of ingredients from a given store, we are using it to piece together a mix of securities, in order to keep us compliant with certain regulatory specifications. CSS (the appearance): In this example, we use it to set things like the color, alignment and the border. They say multiple times that you can come into this job not knowing any rails, and that the interviewers will be accommodating of your background, this is a quarter true. We wrote a controller-level hook to update the variant and render the new layout files, reskinning thepackage. Linear programs try to optimize the value of an objective function. Fortunately, it was a fun experience and it really took very little time! This post is part of series of articles written by Betterments 2013 summer interns. This resulted in app code (the content-specific code) becoming entangled with system (the base HTML) code. The last straw for using whiteboards came from feedback provided by Betterments Women in Technology group. 4. But take a look at the first onenotice the 100+ lines of (omitted) code. Specifically, its that some queues rely on an apps primary database connectionthey are database-backed, against the apps own databasewhereas others rely on a separate datastore, like Redis. It can also dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to solve a problem. 32.0availableacrossallstores. We also assume that there is a baseline degree of software quality baked-in, so error budgets should help us prioritize positive impact opportunities that go beyond these baselines. Has there been an increase in Customer Service requests to resolve problems related to this specific aspect of our service? Changing the objective function and adding new constraints needed to be easy to do. That will reduce friction! So we tried that. Its delightful and easy to parse and has just the right amount of information. We find that there is a lot of value in structuring a system spec as an intuitively sensible user story - with realistic user motivations and behavior, sometimes including the user making mistakes, correcting them, and ultimately being successful. When writing code, we try to keep in mind that we probably won't come back later and clean up the code, and that we never know who the next person to touch this code will be. These tests use the same widgetTester API that regular Widget tests use but they are designed to run on a simulator, emulator, or preferably a real device. Almost We were thrilled about the introduction of this copwe had actually written custom cops prior to its introduction to protect us against using the methods that dont escape content. Soon enough, I had not only expanded my knowledge of engineering best practices, but I learned about dividends, tax loss harvesting, and IRAs (it stands for individual retirement account, in case you were wondering). This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. To keep the momentum going, we needed to transition towards a service-oriented architecture that would allow the engineers of different business units to run in parallel against their specific business goals, creating even more demand for repeatable solutions to service integration. There are only two security zones per GitHub repositorysensitive, and non-sensitiveeven if there are multiple apps in a repository. @Sla @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME) @Target(ElementType.METHOD) public @interface Sla { @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) long amount() default 25_000; @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) ChronoUnit unit() default ChronoUnit.MILLIS; @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) String service() default "custody-web"; @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) String slackChannelName() default "java-team-alerts"; @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) boolean shouldPage() default false; @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) String owner() default "java-team"; } Then usage is just as simple as adding the annotation to the controller: @WebController("/api/stuff/v1/service_we_care_about") public class ServiceWeCareAboutController { @PostMapping("/search") @CustodySla(amount = 500) public SearchResponse search(@RequestBody @Valid SearchRequest request) {} } At deploy time, these annotations are scanned and converted into monitors along with the config-driven definitions, just like our Ruby implementation. These barriers led us to not pursue flutter_drivertests as our solution. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. One year later, weve asked them to reflect on their experiences. Solution Street has been evolving. What are some specific ways in which companies can contribute to these movements and promote a healthier and more inclusive work culture? We look forward to continuing to build upon Airflow and contributing back to the community. SLOs should align with business objectives and needs, which will help Product and Engineering Managers understand the direct business impact of engineering efforts. Questions Interviews are now more prescriptive regarding non-technical questions. I found Chethan to be highly proactive, organised and considerate as a teammate. But we do believe strongly that theres more to agree about than our industry has been able to establish so far. Just the portfolio transition work alone includes significant new code for front-end enhancements which have nothing to do with trading. I recommend going back to LC style questions in the interview or at least have a couple of mock projects ready in several languages similar to the take home test. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. Where are we authorizing the users access to those parameters? One of the tools we use to approach this challenge on the engineering team is a popular Javascript framework called Backbone. The rebrand variant and correlating template file helped us avoid a tangled web of conditionals, and instead boiled down the overhead to a toggle in our ApplicationController. Another thing we learned was that some vendors provide secrets with lower entropy than wed like for API tokens or access keys and they dont provide the option to choose stronger secrets. Then, instead of operating one giant queue, well have broken things down to a number of smaller queues, each with their own worker pools, emitting metrics that can be aggregated with almost the same observability story we have today. Explore our engineering community and nerd out with us on all things tech. Eliminating this potential server lag solved both our CPU-scaling and usability concerns. Thinking big, we decided to dub ourselves Team Polaris after the sky's brightest star. Glassdoor has millions of jobs plus salary information, company reviews, and interview questions from people on the inside making it easy to find a job thats right for you. We had no idea when it failed or missed tagging some contributors. Now that we have our objective function and constraints set up, we just need to solve these equations. In the process of adopting sops and building sopsorific, we discovered the welcoming community and thoughtful maintainers of sops. They're an answer to the question "how can we approximate end-to-end tests for a fraction of the cost?" Were far from perfect, but this is what were doing to embrace the International Womens Day charge and work toward better gender balance at Betterment and in our world. We can collectively build and share a body of interrelated principles driven by insights that our industry as a whole hasnt yet realized or is just beginning to understand. But a scaled engineering org presents other challenges that could just as easily put the goal out of reach. to share a version of the Ruby-API package with the Ruby gem which wraps it) we also maintain a private package registry. The process took 7 weeks. Here was a company that wasnt solely focused on the traditional Computer Science education when hiring an apprentice/junior engineer. We wanted to build our platform around what our engineers would need to know, when they need to know it, and how often. If I do an analysis with open-source tools like R or Python, I can post full end-to-end instructions that anyone in the world can reproduce, check, and expand upon. Dozens of engineers contribute to our biggest repository every day and as the code base and engineering team have grown, the complexity of our CI story has increased and our existing pipeline couldnt keep up. If we need to change our brand colors, lets say, we can just change the CSS in Style Closet instead of scraping our codebase and making sure we catch it everywhere. If you're interviewing for a domain-specific role, expect the questions to center around the specific technology you specialize in, such as AWS or cloud infrastructure, or IoT. 1 Betterment Software Engineer Mobile IOS interview questions and 1 interview reviews. . With Pact, you create a contract file based on the consumer's expectations of an API and you share it with the provider. More from Betterment: Server Javascript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App Going to Work at Betterment Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? In the simple example above with two accounts and two funds, there are a total of four constraints. Try it out! Women Who Code: An Engineering Q&A with Venmo, How We Built Betterment's Retirement Planning Tool in R and JavaScript, Meet Blazer: A New Open-Source Project from Betterment (video), Dealing With the Uncertainty of Legacy Code, One Massive Monte Carlo, One Very Efficient Solution, Engineering the Trading Platform: Inside Betterments Portfolio Optimization, Three Things I Learned In My Engineering Internship. Parting Thoughts on Our Principles Our principles arent permanent as-written. You are viewing a web property located at Betterment.com. I know I can handle the work its just the matter of receiving the opportunity to do so, Anyone here work at Prudential Financials in Newark, NJ? For example, we can tag an element with a data-behavior-dropdown, and then we have some simple, well organized global JavaScript that knows how to wrap that element in some code that makes it more interactive. They are very specific, testing a small portion of the system (the model under test), and cover a wide range of corner cases in that area. Both libraries are great and each is designed for a specific challenge, check both of them out and decide which one works for your needs. Because widget tests aren't typically run on a real device or a simulator/emulator, they run in a context in which we should assume the underlying platform doesn't support using real plugins. Get better unit or integration tests in place as soon as possible. Generating these constraints that ultimately determine buying and selling decisions can often involve tricky business logic that examines a variety of data in our system. The content on this page is reflective of a specific point in time (as of the publication date). The focus of our work has been on delivering a platform as a service to make sense of the complex process of CD. Interviewers were professional throughout. We recently put some code into production that uses an optimizer to cut down on the amount of code were maintaining ourselves, and it turned out to be pretty darn cool. I knew I didnt want to work at a big bank, but I did want to learn more about the industry that employed 16.6% of my classmates at Yale. For instance, is the dollar amount above the target balance in emerging markets bondsthe asset class to where VWOB belongs. As a computer science major, school has taught me how to code in Java, and maybe some of the theoretical stuff that Ive had drilled into my head will come in handy at some point in my life. By harnessing the power of Amazon Web Services (specifically EC2 and S3) and a cloud-based message queue called IronMQ we reduced that testing time to just six hoursand for a total cost of less than $500. After months of planning across all teams at the company, it was time for our engineering team to implement new and responsive designs across all user experiences. I applied online. Changing workflows and acquiring new skills is always an investment, but the dividends here are better collaboration, efficient iteration, transparency in process and confidence in the claims and recommendations you make. Reproducible also means efficient. Therefore, [(0,5),(0,1)(0,1)] In the code example, for readability, I threw all of the inputs into the program into some globals dictionaries. Similarly, is the dollar amount below the target balance in asset class AC. Within the boundaries of that principle, we considered multiple interview formats, including take-home and online assessments, and several variations of pair programming interviews. For many trans folks like myself, this is the name assigned at birth which means all legal and government issued IDs and documents use this non-affirming name. To clarify the hierarchy of how we thought about CI, here are the high level terms and components of ourCoach CLIsystem: There are projects. Like with the other cop, this would fail the build and prevent the code from making it to production. We're always searching for extraordinary people to join our team. I applied online. In order to have control over that plugin, this app has also made a thin wrapper service for that. We arent getting rid of all the JavaScript in our application. Definitely not my cup of tea. As an avid saver, Joe quickly reached his annual Roth IRA contribution limit of $5,500. 1. The code in this package is the glue between our pure Julia functions and the lower level library interfaceits responsible for defining the functions that will be exported by the shared library and doing any necessary conversions on input/output. How is pay, wlb & work culture. "Consistency is key," said Jesse. 2) Small take home problem, mostly about correctly reading requirements and providing an implementation. Like all of our tests, this functions both as regression prevention and as documentation of your intent. It is a read-only, star-schema representation of fact and dimensional tables for growth subject areas. If youre not familiar with asset location, it is a strategy designed to optimize after-tax returns by placing tax-inefficient securities into more tax-advantaged accounts, such as 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). I just happen to know that it was a tool available to us, and it happened to model the problem we needed to solve very well. How likely is it that youll spot a copy-paste error at row 403,658? By knowing that the Coach app is aruby_appwe know how many jobs will need to be run and when. This is because code in the body of the main function and the bodies of groups only runs once and it does so immediately. We had a few options: Rewrite the JavaScript in a way that makes it simpler and easier to use. The remaining test harness code was put in our normal codebase where it can be iterated on freely. Of course, it may require a bit of tuning on your part, and wed love to hear how it goes! After graduation from Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics High School, I completed a semester at Lehman College before unfortunate family circumstances required me to go back to the Dominican Republic. Be the first to find this interview helpful. No trick questions. It does make you feel vulnerable, but it keeps you moving forward. The most obvious alternative was a computer, but then many of our engineers expressed concerns with this method, having had bad experiences with computer-based interviews in the past. Explore open roles Passion for change. First, an idiomatic setup stance. Some javascript questions about scoping and how to build an app. It is your responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, timeliness and completeness of any information available on a linked website. However, we realized there were some issues with the opinions the cop held about some of these methods. The GSON/JSON/SQLite testing framework helped the trading team maintain laser focus on their task, as they worked under the hood. However, recent customer and data growth coupled with new business requirements require us to now scale horizontally with high availability. Deadnaming is when, intentionally or not, you refer to a trans person by the name they used before transitioning. There is still one single point of failure left in our Airflow architecture though: the scheduler. And we need the best to do that. Analysis, Model Building, Learning Youll probably only present one or two of the scores of models and variants you build and test. Open Many analyses meet the above ideals but have been produced with expensive, proprietary statistical software that inhibits sharing and reproducibility. That means that our goal when writing tests should be to figure out how to achieve our target level of confidence that our features work as intended as affordably as possible. Over-testing takes more development time, can add additional work when refactoring or adding new features, slows down the overall test suite, and sets the wrong example for others when referencing existing tests. It also really felt like the company was working in good faith the entire process and I definitely took notice. Normally, this is a process that can literally take years (and may explain why legacy investing services are slow to switch to algorithmic asset allocation and advice.) The best way to avoid legacy code is to make a best effort at not writing in the first place. Given these reasons, Julia is the perfect language to serve as a solution to the two-language problem. End-to-end-ish tests using fake HTTP in Flutter We write tests in order to prove our features work as intended and we run those tests consistently to prove that our features don't stop working as intended. When a test case cares about the specifics of a response, it can override that default. provided they know or can guess its ID - not great! They dont need to define an error budget policy, and they dont need to take action when they fail their aspirational SLO. Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. Our custom solution to integration testing After trying flutters solutions fruitlessly, we decided to build out a solution of our own. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. Tax efficiency is a key consideration of Betterments portfolio management philosophy.