betterment software engineer interview

Any insights would be helpful. Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, I applied online. This includes validations, instance and class method inputs and outputs, Active Record callbacks, and other model behaviors. We wanted to have a test harness that we could use to set up the app under test and the world that the app would run in, however we knew this configuration code would be mildly complicated and something that would be in flux. What resource is the authenticated user operating on? Maintained and open-sourced by Mozilla, sops is a command line utility written in Go that facilitates slick encryption and decryption workflows by using your terminals default editor. If the service doesnt work as intended, no user (or engineer) will be happy. Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. Option 1: Continue Running R Directly Our first plan was to reuse the research code in R and let it continue to run server-side, building an API on top of the core functions. One Massive Monte Carlo, One Very Efficient Solution We optimized our portfolio management algorithms in six hours for less than $500. These are powered by instrumentation and continuous monitoring features that we have added directly to the delayed gem itself. Currently, our Web application is a JavaScript single-page app that uses a frontend MVC framework, backed by a JSON api. The process took 3 weeks. Late one night, we started bouncing ideas off each other on how to pull it off. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. It is bootstrapped (sampled in chunks) to help generate potential futures. 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. Furthermore, this combination of at-least-once execution and idempotency can then be used in a distributed systems context, to ensure the eventual consistency of changes across multiple apps and databases. They were honest and straight shooter, got a good sense of the mainly good and bad working at Betterment. Helping people do whats best with their money requires providing them with responsible security measures to protect their private financial data. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? She and I both live in NYC now, and we see each other regularly at speaking engagements and chat over email about networking and inclusion. 4.5 hr virutal onsite - three 45 min tech interviews with 15 - 30 min breaks. It isnt that much of a stretch to claim that an engineers level of happiness does have some effect on the level of service theyre capable of providing a Betterment customer! 2) Small take home problem, mostly about correctly reading requirements and providing an implementation. 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. We talked to other developers who might be more familiar with it. I interviewed at Betterment. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2023. Of course, it may require a bit of tuning on your part, and wed love to hear how it goes! Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. Explore our engineering community and nerd out with us on all things tech. Here's how they did it. Conclusion The path to building a highly available data processing service was not straightforward, requiring us to build a few specific but critical additions to Airflow. AWS Regions do resilience right. When a secret is added to production, we have a check that makes sure that same secret is also added to all other ecosystems so that they continue to function properly. Friction here refers to ambiguity of CI results and the uncertainty of knowing where your code is in the CI/CD process. Compile the Julia code into a shared library, and call it directly from Ruby usingFFI. Fortunately, Airflow already maintains a wide selection ofhooksto work with remote sources such as S3. Once all of these metrics make it to DataDog, were able to display a comprehensive timeboard that graphs things like average job runtime, throughput, time spent waiting in the queue, error rates, pickup query performance, and even some top 10 lists of slowest and most erroring jobs. Right away we know whats happened. Im not talking about spoken languages. 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. Very pleasant and friendly experience. The gem includes a tiny Julia project with the API library as its only dependency. Have we violated our error budget every month for the past three months? A Journey to Truly Safe HTML Rendering We leverage Rubocops OutputSafety check to ensure were being diligent about safe HTML rendering, so when we found vulnerabilities, we fixed them. I started reading Robert Shillers Finance and the Good Society, a book my dad recommended to me months earlier. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. Building and maintaining the worlds largest independent robo-advisor requires a world-class team of human engineers. What value does a Technical program manager brings to a team? 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. That code should take me from the raw data to the conclusions. For much more on our TCP research, including additional considerations on the suitability of TCP to your circumstances, please see our white paper. Check it out on GitHub. To fulfill that promise, we need to deliver the best product and tools available and then improve them indefinitely, which, when you think about it, sounds incredibly ambitious or even foolhardy. In other words, the following test file will always exit successfully, despite the fact that there are obvious issues with how its set up. What does the future hold? I found coding super similar from a composition and structure perspective, which allowed me to tap into the creative side of coding. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? Everybody wins. There are a few other advantages and problems this system solves too: Were able to make global changes in a pretty painless way. 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). I have experience in several different backend/ frontend frameworks, yet rails has some specific quirks, and your interviewers will not help you in this regard, but will simply try to see how you figure out, so they basically force you to google mid interview, and set you on a timer. Striking the right balance between these priorities and thoroughly executing both is paramount to RetireGuides success, and we didnt want to miss the mark on either dimension. Be the first to find this interview helpful, If you had $10k how would you sell yourself for the role. You will work with an interviewer for a pair programming experience. He calls around to all the stores just to see what the have in stock and puts together each stores inventory: Ingredients in stock (lbs) Elaines Georges Jerrys Newmans Chicken 5 6 2 3 Carrots 1 8 5 2 Thyme 3 19 16 6 Onions 6 12 10 4 Noodles 5 0 3 9 Garlic 2 1 1 0 Parsley 3 6 2 1 Also, the quality of the bags at all of the stores vary, limiting the total number pounds of food the Soup Nazi can carry back. Given requirements and interface, provide an implementation At no point did I feel the pressure thats normally associated with landing a job. This light coat of paint was applied to our production layer, so any experience that couldnt be fully redesigned within our timeline would still get a fresh header and the fonts and colors that reflected our new brand. System specs are more performance intensive than the other spec types, so in most cases we lean towards fewer system specs that do more things, going against the convention that tests should be very granular with one assertion per test. For instance, tasks that saturate CPU are best run on a compute optimized worker with concurrency set to the number of cores. As our team has grown impressively from five to more than 50 engineers (and this was just in the last three years), weve significantly improved our abilities to make clearer hiring decisions, as well as shortened our total hiring timeline. If, for example, our user research says we should aim for 99.5% uptime, thats 3h 21m 36s of downtime available per 28 days. If youre significantly exercising behavior not in the layer youre writing a test for, you might be putting the test in the wrong place. Looking for the best java software engineer interview questions to ask candidates during your hiring process? 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 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. You will need to be passingly familiar with the language they're using. It's a standard test double, and it does the trick. Every situation is different and if you are unsure what the appropriate test coverage is for a particular feature, start a discussion with your team! Then Newman. Jennifer Arguello - I met Jennifer at the White House Tech Inclusion Summit back in 2013, where we hit it off talking about diversity in tech and her time with the Latino Startup Alliance. After flipping the feature flag and establishing rebrand as the permanent variant context, all that remained was to destroy the legacy files that were no longer being rendered and remove the variant name from the file extension of the new primary view template. However, writing mathematical proofs and small Java codes that complete standalone tasks seems pretty pointless now that Ive experienced the real world of software development. It is a historical archive and is not intended to be updated. As we stated in our requirements for Coach in the first post, we believe there should be one way to test code, and one way to deploy it. 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. 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. 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). One challenge we have that most existing iOS apps share is the need to still support older iOS versions. First was with 2 members on the team, last was with a manager. Changing the objective function and adding new constraints needed to be easy to do. It began with some verbal Q&A about how things like databases and the internet work, along with certain tradeoffs. If embedding your Julia library into a multi-threaded application, youll need additional tooling to only initialize and make calls into the Julia library from a single thread, as multiple calls to `jl_init`will error. Using Targeted Universalism To Build Inclusive Features The best products are inclusive at every stage of the design and engineering process. We recently re-optimized our portfolio to include more complex asset allocations and risk models (and it will soon be available). See a demo of how it works. Jesse Harrelson, a Betterment Software Engineer, not only leads our hosting events, they found a path to Betterment through Women Who Code. As of July 2016, all full-stack, mobile, and site-reliability engineering roles have adopted this new approach. Or perhaps the users for a service are Betterment engineers, and its really unclear how that work affects the people who use our companys products. I interviewed at Betterment (Columbia, MD) in May 2022. That means, x=[a1,a2,,a7,b1,b2d7]. All teams at Betterment are responsible for teasing apart complex financial concepts and then presenting them in a coherent manner, enabling our customers to make informed financial decisions. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. The special sauce is that it works for more than just your tests. In order to effectively work on multiple pieces of an app, an engineer needs to be fluent in multiple different languages. The rebranded version of our applications core layout imported the new CSS file and just like that, we were in business. What are some ways we can all work together to empower each other in overcoming imposter syndrome? My responsibilities are to develop new functionalities, bug fixing, maintaining and deploying production and staging applications. Making a fake implementation of that plugin is typically as easy as making another class, prefixing its name with Fake and having it implement the public contract of the regular plugin class with suitably real but not quite real behavior. Heres how we did it. Therefore, the cop should hold the same opinions aboutsafe_concatas it does about the other two methods. As of July 2016, all full-stack, mobile, and site-reliability engineering roles have adopted this new approach. Non app owners have the ability to assume the secret-editor role for non-sensitive ecosystems only. We can use our database relationships to ensure that users can only see their own documents. Our unit tests are not only to test behavior and drive good design, but should also be readable to the extent that they help document the code itself. Meet Joe Joe is a hypothetical Betterment customer. A multi-threaded, SQL-driven ActiveJob backend used at Betterment to process millions of background jobs per day. With the gem installed, we can use the generator rails g webvalve:install to bootstrap a default config file where we can register our fakes. This is where SLOs come in. Total of 6 interviews (phone and in person) Betterment was super supportive and accommodating. NDA signed. Ask-me-anything1:1 with an engineer on another team, 3. Im going to take you through our testing journey from a limited native automated testing suite and heavy dependence on manual testing, to trying flutters integration testing solutions, to ultimately deciding to build out our own framework to increase confidence in the integration of our components. Questions Interviews are now more prescriptive regarding non-technical questions. 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. 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. Dynamicism. The main exception to these guidelines is when your controller is an API controller serving data to another app. 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. We also split the main programming portion of our original interview into separate sections with different interviewers. And so one of the first components we built out was this new communication pipeline. Developers can also run these validations locally: sopsorific check Deployment The application server is configured with the instance profile generated by sopsorific so that it can assume the IAM role that it needs to decrypt the secrets at runtime. Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. Step 2: 2-3 hour pair programming technical round in an IDE. We decided to lean on RuboCop for this work. We needed a workflow with less of a bottleneck, but allowing every developer access to all the secrets across the organization wasnotan acceptable answer. I dragged my chair ten feet across the office and began my new life as the engineering lead of Betterments nascent data teammy new mates included two talented data analysts, a data warehousing engineer and a marketing analyst, also the product owner. Frameworks Galore! As good companies tend to do, it began growingnot just in terms of users, but in terms of capabilities. Legacy code can take a long time to properly test and remove. Rane Johnson - I met Rane at the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing in 2011, and then again when I interned at Microsoft in 2012. So, we decided that we really only want to write these flutter_driver end-to-end tests for a tiny subset of our features, almost like a "smoke testing" suite that would signal us if something was seriously wrong with our app. Its part of the CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) process. This is a rails specific interview, where you get a rails app and you go through it fixing and creating features. By having these changes in version control, each addition to the CI pipeline goes through code review and requires tests be written. We believe in a world where shipping code, even in really large codebases with lots of contributors, should be done dozens of times a day. Extending AirflowCode Airflow tasks that pass data to each other can run on different machines, presenting a new challenge versus running everything on a single machine. Those interviewers dont fill out a scorecard, and our hiring managers are forbidden from discussing candidates with them. According to Healthline, because legal name changes are expensive, inaccessible, and not completely effective at eliminating deadnaming, institutions like Betterment can and should make changes to support our trans customers. Now, back to the future These are just the first few bootstrapping steps. A little bit of disclaimer here before we start digging in a little more: I can barely scratch the surface of how solvers work. Betterment is an engineering-driven company that has developed the most trusted online financial advisor based on the principles of optimization and efficiency. We are built from the ground up on a foundation of data. If you are new to one or both of these environments, it can be daunting to sort through all of the tools and figure out what does what. We therefore have the added benefit of knowing that updates to CI have been tested and are deemed valid and working before theyre distributed, and we can prevent folks from removing a feature without considering the impact it may have. It was built out over the past few years, with many different paradigms and patterns. Lets assume that a User has many Attachments that can be attached to a Document they own. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? When theres no more work to be had, the worker shuts itself down. These interviews are in Ruby on Rails - know ruby on rails beforehand, since it is difficult to read / implement on the spot. Step 2: 2-3 hour pair programming technical round in an IDE. The first member of this triad is betterment_live. We implemented a local fallback mixin for Airflow maintained hooks that uses the local filesystem for development and testing, deferring to the actual hooks remote functionality only on production. Keeping Our Code Base Simple, Optimally Betterment engineers turned regulatory compliance rules into an optimization problem to keep the code base simple. Betterment sits at the intersection of finance and technologytwo industries with large, historical diversity gaps, including women and underrepresented populations. 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. Questions were in JavaScript, ruby on rails, and React having to implement specific features into a pre developed app. In this model there is no single controller. You are viewing a web property located at Betterment.com. polling a database) can run on higher concurrency per CPU core to save overall resources. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? Were working to change thatfor ourselves and our industries. It's just collecting fake responses and organizing them so that they're easy to access later.As you can see, the internals are pretty tiny. How did you manage when you were under pressure? What I mean by fake plugins is really simple. Finally, weve added an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessionanother idea provided by our Women in Technology group. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. Our principles derive from and are matched to Betterments collective experience and context. For this we can use a mathematical programming solver. Through fakes. The resulting analytical master file was still large, but small enough to fit on a regular MacBook Pro. It is your responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, timeliness and completeness of any information available on a linked website. This means any unhandled exception occurring in your Julia code will result in a segmentation fault. We like to extract standard assertions such as ones relating to authentication into shared examples. Timeline Another change is that the entire onsite interview is completed in a single day. Isolate the right information With this abstraction, we were able to isolate the absolute core objects that we need to perform trades, and ignore the rest. Unfortunately, if it were so simple we wouldnt be here, several paragraphs into a blog post on the topic. Theyre an alternative to the kind of high-level systems integration tests that would include a critical mass of components that would render the test slow and non-repeatable. Therefore, to make sure we limit chicken to 40% of the overall ingredients, one element of the constraints tuple will be, {'type':'ineq', 'fun':lambdax:sum(extract_ingredient_specific_pounds(x,chicken))(calc_total_pounds_of_food(x)*.4)} Making sure the soup nazi is able to carry everything back from the store: 12a1a2a7>=0 17d1d2d7>=17 Leads to, {'type':'ineq', 'fun':lambdax:max_per_store[store]np.sum(extract_store_specific_pounds(x,store))} Hopefully this gives you enough information to make sense of the code example. While many of these tasks merely sent a transactional email, or fired off an iOS or Android push notification, plenty involved the actual movement of moneydeposits, withdrawals, transfers, rollovers, you name itwhile others kept Betterments information systems up-to-datesyncing customers linked account information, logging events to downstream data consumers, the list goes on. But we do believe strongly that theres more to agree about than our industry has been able to establish so far. Without getting into the gory details, this essentially requires us, for every test we write, to stub a request for user datawith differences across minor things like ID values, we cant share these stubs between tests. Were able to write tests specific to the component without worrying about the use-case or increasing testing time for our apps. Their goal is to test you on your collaboration skills (as well as technical skill). They also give background on the role and team structure. Specifically, we wanted a tight feedback loop between the business and technology so that we could experiment and figure out what worked before committing real dollars to a solutionaka high-frequency hypothesis testing. As for merges into master, the way we sent Slack messages to communicate to engineering teams (as opposed to just individuals) was limited because of how our CI/CD process was constructed.