2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. Our goal was to replace the old way of building and testing our applications (what we called the Old World) and start fresh with these principles in mind (what we deemed the New World). Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. I also pay attention to the use of appropriate design patterns and algorithms . 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. 0<=a1<=5 0<=a2<=1 0<=a3<=3 0<=a4<=6 0<=d7<=1 That expresses all of the constraints and bounds to our problem and the optimizer works to maximize or minimize the objective function subject to those bounds and constraints. Betterment sits at the intersection of finance and technologytwo industries with large, historical diversity gaps, including women and underrepresented populations. Whats next? Dealing With the Uncertainty of Legacy Code To complete our portfolio optimization, we had to tackle a lot of legacy code. I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. Updating the most visible spots in our application. Basically give intros, talk about your experience and what youre looking for. This means that we have to also inject fake implementations of any plugins we use. Most analyses contain too many important detailed steps to plausibly communicate in an email or during a meeting. A nice property that weve observed at Betterment, and that might apply to you as well, is that the number of jobs tends to scale proportionally with the number of customers and accounts. To make this fake work, all we have to do is define the conventionally-named environment variable, TRADINGAPIURL. We began with thispull requestto patch the first issuechange the behavior of the cop to recognizerawandhtmlsafeas violations regardless of being wrapped insafejoin. If you made a mistake, how do you handle that situation? Engineering the Launch of a New Brand for Betterment In 2017, Betterment set out tolaunch a new brandto better define the voice and feel of our product. How did I go from creating avatars with Pikachu ears to improving detection of financial criminals? As we transitioned to flutter, we made unit/screen testing and code testability a high priority, pushing for thorough coverage. We needed a workflow with less of a bottleneck, but allowing every developer access to all the secrets across the organization wasnotan acceptable answer. Those come to life in four major principles, which guide how we engage with the problem space for our shift to a service-oriented architecture: We use HTTP & REST to communicate with collaborator services We define the boundaries and limit the testing of integrations with contract tests We don't share code across service boundaries Engineers must remain nimble and building features must remain enjoyable. Given requirements, explain how one may model some data. Knowing this, we decided to focus on happy paths of flows. 16.0availableacrossallstores. Secondly, we need to define the boundaries in terms of contracts. Contracts are a point of exchange between the consumption side (the app) and producer side (the collaborator service). I got a very upbeat and cheery sounding email to schedule the call, and my heart was pounding as I waited, and then I was met with a rejection. I applied online. In this case, we were able to extract a solution to a complicated problem and keep our OO domain-specific logic clean. Where engineers can experience feedback about their code with delight and simplicity. The process took 2 days. We could have attempted to construct a procedural-style heuristic solution to this, but the complexity of the problem led us to believe this approach would be hard to implement and challenging to maintain. We have big dreams for the future of this platform with more and more engineers using our product. Here's how they did it. Every component is on brand and consistent with every other app, feels polished, high quality and requires lower effort to implement. Im Jesse, a recruiter here at Betterment, and I had the immense pleasure of working closely with these two. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. No whiteboards. Plenty of jobs may complete in failure, or simply fail to complete, and may require some form of automated or manual intervention. In each case, once I had a clear solution in mind, we shifted to a laptop set up with IntelliJ to implement and test parts of my solution. We knew both of those would need to change. We built an additional package into our monorepo whose sole purpose was to expose an API for our Ruby application, as well as compile that exposed code into a C shared library. To learn more, we encourage you to watch the below video featuring Betterments Sam Moore, a lead engineer, who reveals the new framework at a Meetup in Betterments NYC offices. LinkedIn question - Architect the LinkedIn home screen (feed) for the mobile app. To do good data work today, you need to use a system that is: Reproducible Its not personal, but I dont trust any number that comes without supporting code. De-scoping with a Lightweight Reskin To rebrand hundreds of pages in time, we had to iron out the precise requirements of what it meant for our views to be on brand. I stayed there for several years until last May, when I uprooted my life to New York for Betterment, and I havent looked back since. Think of something like Heroku, but for engineers here at Betterment. At Betterment, we build public facing applications without an authorization framework by following three principles, discussed in another blog post. The IRA calculator runs primarily in R, computing its advice on a Shiny server. Instead of multiple interviewers asking a candidate about the same questions based on their resum, we prescribe topics based on the most important core competencies of successful (Betterment) engineers. While working, I would take any available time for courses on websites like Codecademy and Team Treehouse. When we add new components or make changes, we update the gem (as well as the docs site associated with Style Closet) and simply release the new version. There is no need to test corner cases or very specific business logic in system specs (those assertions belong in model specs). By the way, this is a topic I could talk about endlessly, so Ill leave it there for now. Well only be notified if, over 7 days or 30 days or even longer, they exceed the target goal weve defined for our service. High Availability inAirflow While Airflow doesnt claim to be highly available out of the box, we built an infrastructure to get as close as possible. Building Diversity And Inclusion At Betterment Change starts at the heart of the matter. So weve established that we dont want to hit external services in tests, which we can do through WebMock or similar libraries. Once we migrate to Rails 5, we should even be able to easily take advantage of Turbolinks 3, which is a conventionalized way to do regional AJAX updates. Here's how we turned a request for more inclusion into a feature all Betterment customers can benefit from. Lets say it is. Being that Java only covered a small piece of this structure, I had a lot of languages to learn. For me, simple questions bring to mind this interesting concept called The Illusion Of Explanatory Depth, which is when people feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do. Simple questions tend to shed light on subjects shrouded in this illusion and force you to confront your lack of knowledge. Flutter provides good solutions for both screen testing and UI testing, but what about the middle-ground? Java Software Engineer - Interview Questions To Ask Granted, having exactly-once semantics would be preferable, but if we cannot be sure that our jobs run at least once, then we must ask ourselves: how would we know if something didnt run at all? Maybe we need to reevaluate the metrics were collecting, or perhaps were okay with setting a lower target goal because there are other targets that will be more important to our customers. Of course, it may require a bit of tuning on your part, and wed love to hear how it goes! For example, if our system sold something at a short-term capital gain in Joes taxable account, or bought a security in his Roth IRA that was sold at a loss in the last 30 daystriggering the wash-sale rule, we would be negatively impacting his after-tax return. The product and engineering leadership I spoke to all came off as humble and knowledgeable, and were open about existing pain points and challenges. Find out what is missing from the rails app. Part of that commitment includes reflecting the diversity of those customers. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? Wed shrink the expected results we got from production, then re-inflate and compare them to what our tests produced. Helping people do whats best with their money requires providing them with responsible security measures to protect their private financial data. We stubbed out the plugins by writing lightweight wrappers around them then providing them to the app at a high level that we could easily override with fakes for the purpose of integration testing. For our Ruby on Rails apps, that looks like this: sopsorific run 'bundle exec rails c' What did we learn? With VisiCalc, the first-ever spreadsheet program, in 1979 and Excel in 1987, the business world stepped into two new eras in which any employee could manage large amounts of data. My only criticism would be that since I mainly had experience with Eclipse instead of IntelliJ, we wasted a small amount of time fiddling with the controls. You should follow GitLab's example and make Ruby a requirement if you're going to continue your practice of having an onsite where Ruby is the only allowed language. Reports available to the entire office were next. But, if Elaine was set up a certain way, we wanted to go back to Jerry and adjust the decisions we made for him. Tax efficiency is a key consideration of Betterments portfolio management philosophy. When I returned to the United States, I worked in the retail sector for a few years. Given requirements and interface, provide an implementation Review your software engineer resume and cover letter. Finally, to bolt this on to an IRL application, we need the ability to define fakes incrementally and migrate them into existing integrations that we have, one by one. The main recurring issue was that hiring managers were left uncertain as to whether a candidate truly possessed the technical aptitude and skills to justify making them an employment offer. In other words, the following test file will always exit successfully, despite the fact that there are obvious issues with how its set up. Next, we find the leftover pennies by taking the inflow minus the total of the integer quotients, which is 123456(38271 + 43209 + 24691 + 17283) = 2. Some of the topics that came up were - implementing a http endpoint, writing code to make a rspec pass, active record operations. For our customers, it should result in better expected, risk-adjusted returns for investments. Our hiring managers now report that they have a much clearer understanding of what each candidate brings to the table. straightforward interview process, the Betterment apprenticeship quickly . To get there we had to make all of our Java apps respond to the same set of commands, and all of our Ruby apps to do the same. Ask Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two Harvard economists who published an influential paper on sovereign debt and economic growth, only to find out that the results rested in part on the accidental omission of five cells from an average. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. To illustrate, lets suppose youre a Betterment customer with three different accounts: a Roth IRA, a traditional IRA, and a taxable retirement account. Here's how they did it. Whether its a database query, a Web-scraping function, a MapReduce job, or a PDF extraction, script it and include it in your reproducible process. Very pleasant and friendly experience. They were honest and straight shooter, got a good sense of the mainly good and bad working at Betterment. Editing a file is as simple as: sops deployment_secrets/sensitive/production.yml Testing We built a series of validations into sopsorific to further enforce our opinions about secrets management. Meet Blazer: A New Open-Source Project from Betterment (video) While we love the simplicity and flexibility of Backbone, weve recently encountered situations where the Backbone router didnt perfectly fit the needs of our increasingly sophisticated application. We use Slack, like a lot of other companies, so that part of the messaging story wouldnt change, but there were bugs we needed to fix and design flaws we needed to update. Joes overall portfolio must also maintain its allocation of 50% stocks and 50% bondsthe risk profile he selected. The usage pattern is for folks to connect to client_analytics and from there to: cross-query against the betterment_live schema, import/export and manipulate custom datasets with Python or R, perform regression and analysis, etc. I did not get the offer but I would have declined as I was offered a position from two other companies. Tests were flakey and we didnt know if it was our Jenkins setup, the tests themselves, or both. All the info I provided is given to you at the time of the interview. In this post, Ill share how we solved the problem by leaning on functional programming to allocate money precisely across proportional buckets. Feb 2019 - Present4 years 2 months. As such, information on this page may not be up to date. Now, I know that my money (well, the money I will hopefully have in the future) ideally should work hard for me instead of just sitting in a savings account. Assuming a User has many Documents then we would change our controller to the following: Now any document_id that doesnt exist in the users object graph will raise a 404 and weve provided authorization for this endpoint without a framework - easy peezy. Instead, each worker acts independently. Or they can define some SLOs around types of on-call tasks that their team tackles each week. Inform the roadmap Within three weeks of operations, it became clear that we could use turn-around time metrics from ad-hoc or advisory requests to inform us where we need to invest in project cycles and technology. Phone call + take home test prior to onsite. Additionally, request specs are much more realistic than controller specs since they actually exercise the full request / response lifecycle routing, middleware, etc whereas controller specs circumvent much of that process. REST is semantic, evolvable, limber, and very familiar to us as Rails developers a natural other side of the coin for HTTP to make up the lingua franca of the web. This is the slightly nicer part of SLOs versus simple monitors - we arent going to be pinged for every latency failure or error rate spike. Plus, even when running in the most durable mode, Redis-based ActiveJob backends tend to dequeue jobs before they are executed, meaning that if a worker process crashes at the wrong moment, or is terminated during a code deployment, the job is lost. 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. The interviews varied between programming questions, system design and behavioral. My first task involved DTC participants, CUSIPs, and ACATSall terms that Id never heard before. 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. 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. No matter where they fall on that spectrum, each of these solutions has tradeoffs in its approach. Friction here refers to ambiguity of CI results and the uncertainty of knowing where your code is in the CI/CD process. The umbrella term observability covers all manner of subjects, from basic telemetry to logging, to making claims about longer-term performance in the shape of service level objectives (SLOs) and occasionally service level agreements (SLAs). Overall, the process was great. These were our outputs. Onboarding new hires familiar with the Rails framework will be faster, and those who arent familiar can find great external (and internal) resources to learn it. Open Many analyses meet the above ideals but have been produced with expensive, proprietary statistical software that inhibits sharing and reproducibility. Betterment Software Engineer, Backend Interview Questions At a high level, a service level objective is a way of measuring the performance of, correctness of, validity of, or efficacy of some component of a service over time by comparing the functionality of specific service level indicators (metrics of some kind) against a target goal. Worse yet, its impossible to remember exactly what youve done in a point and click environment, so doing it the same way again next time is a crap shoot. We want the API provider to own and version their APIs, and we want the API consumer to own their integration with each version of a collaborator service's API. 1 Betterment Software Engineer Mobile IOS interview questions and 1 interview reviews. Enabling preferred first names moves us towards a more inclusive product. Lots of STAR method and cultural fit questions. From 1 to N: Distributed Data Processing with Airflow Betterment has built a highly available data processing platform to power new product features and backend processing needs using Airflow. In Spring of 2017, Betterments Diversity & Inclusion Steering Committee partnered with our Engineering Team to bring on two developers with non-traditional backgrounds. Were constantly shipping small, vertical slices of work hidden behind feature flags and weve even built our own open-source system,TestTrack, to help us do so. This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. Really good! It is a historical archive and is not intended to be updated. Ruthe Farmer - I first met Ruthe back in 2010 during my senior year of high school when I won the Illinois NCWIT Aspirations Award. In building a platform as a service (PaaS), we realized that in order to mitigate the problem ofnurturing pets vs herding cattlewe would need to identify a firm set of acceptance criteria for different runtimes. This project would be no exception. Lets plug in some balances to see what the expected value of V is with Joes current holdings: V=0.07*5500+0.04*5500+0.06*2750+0.05*2750=907.5 Certainly, we can do better. We realized that the dependency graph of repository projects project jobs was complicated enough that we would need to recreate the entire.circleci/config.ymlfile whenever we needed to update it, instead of just modifying the YAML file in place. Through dependency injection, the new generator is included among the set of generators used to generate constraints. I applied online. We took advantage of the divmod method in Ruby to grab the integer quotient and remainder in one shot, like so: buckets.map do |bucket| (inflow * bucket).divmod(total_bucket_weight) end This gives us 12345631000/100000, 12345635000/100000, 12345620000 /100000 and 12345614000/100000. It also keeps the test file clean of WidgetTester interaction, making the tests read more like a series of human actions rather than a series of code instructions. Rebranding a feature involved adding new styles to the application_rebrand.css and implementing them in new rebrand view files. In order to fulfill two of our main requirements: being able to run as part of our normal test suite in CI and having a familiar API, we knew wed need to build our framework on top of flutters existing screen test framework. Each account has a 70/30 allocation, and the accounts will add up to 70/30 in the aggregate, but we can do better when it comes to maximizing after-tax returns. Three Things I Learned In My Engineering Internship I knew I had a lot to learn about how a Web app works, but I never imagined that it involved as much as it does. Authorization through Impossibility This principle might feel intuitive, but its worth reiterating that at Betterment we never build endpoints that allow users to access another users data. Wanting to save more for his retirement, he decided to open up a Betterment taxable account, which he funded with an additional $11,000. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. The first was our flutter/native boundary. And, yes, you heard that right. There needs to be a way to set up a new project. Interviewers were professional throughout. The takeaway The biggest lesson to learn from this experience is that, as an engineer, you should not be afraid to take a functional approach when it makes sense. We could not only make good decisions for Elaine, Jerry, and Newman, we could make those decisions optimally. Technical interview (computer science fundamentals), Technical interview (modelling and app design), Ask the candidate to describe a recent technical challenge in detail, Introduce the pair programming problem and explore the problem, Pair programming (optional, time permitting). talked about the company and the role. However, if your tests arent run in random order, you may have a false sense of confidence that the assertions youre making in them are actually accurate. Limits are subject to change from year to year, so please defer to IRS guidelines for current limits. I applied online. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. But that leaves us with a pretty large gap where it's way too easy for us to accidentally create a feature that depends on some Provider that's not provided and our app blows up at runtime in a user's hands. If an application absolutely needs to be able to show certain data, consider structuring the endpoint in a way such that a client cant even attempt to request another users data. As an engineer, I not only love building products from the ground up, but Im passionate about bringing awareness to diversity in tech, an important topic that has soared to the forefront of social justice issues. The name Betterment jumped out at me on a job listings page because it sounded like it would make my life better. Betterment is a financial technology, or fintech, company; while it provides financial services, its an engineering company at its core. (Dont Repeat Yourself) and to implement UX design changes effectively and uniformly.. A little over a year ago, we rebranded our entire site. Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. In this case, it meant paring the conditions down to making it work using just rails. Building for Better: Gender Inclusion at Betterment Betterment sits at the intersection of two industries with large, historical gender gaps. Each would ask same question , only rephrased. Secrets management is one of those things that is talked about quite frequently, but there seems to be little consensus on how to actually go about it. Williams goal is to help women recognize the characteristic and empower them to overcome it. Lets call it resilience. We escape content primarily to avoid opening ourselves up to XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks. Takeaways Though our venture into the Julia world is still relatively young compared to most of the other code at Betterment, we have found Julia to be a perfect fit in solving our two-language problem within the Investing team.
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