betterment software engineer interview

There was no hint of arrogance or a lack of candor from anyone. At Betterment, were usingJuliato power the projections and recommendations we provide to help our customers achieve their financial goals. Interviews. This led to maintenance issues, and it made our application harder to test. We know it has some sort of network interactions for fetching profile info and posts as well as for posting images and editing a profile. Hello, I am Siddhi Bhanushali, MLH Prep Fellow'22 , Former Community Associate Intern at Scaler,also the former Lead of HackClub SIGCE, wherein several events, workshops, competitions have been carried out successfully under my tenure & guidance which impacted 250+ students. How much money do you put in each account? Pretty Easy. Since then, the team has met several times to gather feedback and implement tweaks, but the broad strokes have remained unchanged. 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 think that our Web app will be just as pleasant to use, and we can more quickly enhance and build new features going forward. 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? On the other hand, some methods are just a means for us to mark content as already safe. This type of bug is typically referred to as an Insecure Direct Object Reference vulnerability. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Julia is a newer language that looked like a perfect fit for the investing team for a number of reasons: Speed. By only using the server as a JSON API, the frontend needed to know exactly what to do with that JSON. I was one of those kids who broke their toys in order to find out how they worked. The process took 1 week. Development Engineers have permissions to assume the secret-editor role for the security zones they have access to. From an engineering perspective, this means we needed to enhance the code in our existing trading platform to accommodate dynamic asset allocation, with an eye towards future enhancements in our pipeline. If youre significantly exercising behavior not in the layer youre writing a test for, you might be putting the test in the wrong place. Until now, we executed transactions based on fixed weights or a precise allocation of assets to every level of risk. It looks just like our ideal spec from before: We leverage all the power of WebMock and Sinatra through our conventions and the teeniest configuration to provide all the same functionality as before, but we can write cleaner tests, we get the ability to use these fakes in local development instead of the real servicesand we can enable a real service integration without missing a beat. 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. I identified the most visible spots where we address a user and changed them, but for less visible changes I took this new map and delegated cross-squad ownership of each usage. Form small groups: People are more open to talking closely with smaller groups than a large discussion roundtable. 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. In this case, our second test is relying on the side effects of the first test. What behavioral and market shifts can we expect to see from fintech in the next five to 10 years? On the alerting side, we have DataDog monitors in place for overall queue statistics, like max age SLA violations, so that we can alert and page ourselves when queues arent working off jobs quickly enough. 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. In this post, Ill share how we solved the problem by leaning on functional programming to allocate money precisely across proportional buckets. Examine the following types of interviews you may encounter during the software engineer hiring process to help you better prepare: Phone screens The phone screening portion of a software engineer interview usually begins with a brief conversation with a recruiter. Redis-based queues, for example, can only be as durable (the D in ACID) as the underlying datastore, and most Redis deployments intentionally trade-off some durability for speed and availability. In short, these bugs allow attackers to access data directly using its unique identifiers even if that data belongs to someone else because the application fails to take authorization into account. Within the boundaries of that principle, we considered multiple interview formats, including take-home and online assessments, and several variations of pair programming interviews. These were our inputs. Non-CPU intensive tasks (e.g. If you had prior experience with these languages the problems are easy to solve. Because its in source control and it runs through its own CI process, we can also easily roll out changes to notifications without breaking things. As weve circled back to clean up these lower-traffic views and give them the full rebrand treatment, weve come closer to deleting the opt_out CSS manifest and deprecating our our legacy stylesheets for good. Implementation Given how new Julia is, there was minimal literature on true interoperability with other programming languages (particularly high-level languagesRuby, Python, etc). This made our results robust to the risk of solely optimizing for the past, a common error in the analysis of strategies. A bonus of Style Closet is how well its able to host these React components since they can simply be incorporated into a view by being wrapped in a Style Closet component. Im Jesse, a recruiter here at Betterment, and I had the immense pleasure of working closely with these two. 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. But take a look at the first onenotice the 100+ lines of (omitted) code. Weve pushed the aforementioned nuisance and complexity into our data pipeline (ETL) process and are able to synthesize atomic and summary metrics in a format that is more intuitive for our business users. That code should take me from the raw data to the conclusions. Heres a simplified version of our upstart configuration. Understanding these tradeoffs is what helped our Engineering team at Betterment decide on a solution that made the most sense for our applications. A Redis-based queue will still introduce DB pressure if its jobs execute anything involving ActiveRecord models, and solutions must exist to throttle or rate limit these jobs. Also, model factories shouldnt by default save associated models that arent required for that models persistence. Take a minute and review this controller - what jumps out to you? Mathematically, its straightforward to represent the first restriction as two linear constraints. Meetings thus far have included a panel discussion on breaking into tech from the corporate world and a small-group financial discussion led by financial experts from Betterment and beyond. 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. What are some ways we can all work together to empower each other in overcoming imposter syndrome? A PR build failed. Maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration. Abletocarry8.0pounds. Testing our Rails applications allows us to build features more quickly and confidently by proving that code does what we think it should, catching regression bugs, and serving as documentation for our code. This lets us distribute changes across the org quickly. In this post, well be sharing that journey. Secret-editor roles are named after their corresponding IAM role which includes the security zone and the name of the GitHub repository. And, boy howdy, are there plenty of available frameworks for doing this kind of thing! It is a historical archive and is not intended to be updated. A flash message/warning is something you may use throughout your app in different colors and with different text, but you want it to look consistent. The circles represent various asset classes, and the bar shows the allocation for all the accounts, if added together. The process took 2 weeks. In Rails 5+, integration tests have been made to run very fast. This meant when the designs were changed, we needed to find all of the places this code was used to update it. This question can help the interviewer determine if you have the skills necessary to succeed in this role. We stay in regular contact with stakeholders throughout a build-out and iterate over MVPs. We use Python more for data pipeline processes and R more for modeling, analyses, and reporting. My responsibilities are to develop new functionalities, bug fixing, maintaining and deploying production and staging applications. 16.0availableacrossallstores. To ensure true randomness, always pass random as the seed. Isnt resilience a basic feature of every backend, except maybe the test/development ones? Today, on its first day, were thrilled to announce that the Betterment iOS app fully supports Apples new Face ID technology on the iPhone X. Trusting the SecureEnclave While were certainly proud of shipping this feature quickly, a lot of credit is due to Apple for how seriously the company takes device security and data privacy as a whole. Just as the Ford Motor Company created efficiency with assembly line production and Pixar opened up new worlds by computerizing animation, companies now are innovating and improving the craft of using data to do business. talked about the company and the role. It took eight hours a day of working on a personal finance product for me to notice that the iceberg was even there. "Chethan was a senior to me at the time and was given the role of a buddy-coach to me, when I joined ESKO in the year 2021. Were not just writing code. 4. Kelly Hoey - I met Kelly at a women in tech hackathon during my last summer as a student in 2013, and then she ended up being on my team on the British Airways UnGrounded Thinking hackathon. Exception handlingconveying unhandled exceptions across the FFI boundary is generally not possible. As we've grown, we've had to push at the limits of what a database-backed queue can accomplish. We can use WebMock to wire the fake to requests that match a certain pattern. As a result, in addition to learning how well a candidate can write code, we learn how well they collaborate. There are a few major wins here: Unifying our business logic. I made the jump to start becoming an engineer. Coachis the beginning of that platform. We sent out questionnaires in advance but collected answers through face-to-face dialogue. The CLI handles notifications, artifact generation, and deployment triggers. As developers of financial software on the web, one of our biggest responsibilities is to keep our applications secure. In our experience, it has always taken longer than expected. InfoSec Taylor Swift. Lets say that his Roth IRA holds $2,750 of VTI, and $2,750 of VWOB. Our app is one of those apps. The right hand side of the equation is assumed to be zero. To set up a new app all you need to do is be in the directory for your project and then runcoach create project --type $project_type. With a solid plan for gathering user input, we pivoted to the bigger question: Where should we use a customers preferred first name? 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. Prior to Betterment, I only had experience with super small codebases that I built myself or with friends. How did you manage when you were under pressure? Explore our engineering community and nerd out with us on all things tech. However, there are still a few more things to note: Get numpy and scipy installed. I found coding super similar from a composition and structure perspective, which allowed me to tap into the creative side of coding. Heres how we did it. This did two things: it took testing off the developers plates early in the process, allowing them to focus on writing production code, and also helped isolate the central objects that required most of their attention. This allows us to continue composing a UI with self contained building blocks. This was a wonderful opportunity to practice targeted universalism: a concept that explains how building features specifically for a marginalized audience not only benefit the people in that marginalized group, but also people outside of it, which increases its broad impact. How did we doit? Writing end-to-end tests is pretty expensive. But I soon realized it was just the opposite: Knowing less about finance motivated me to learnquickly. 1) Phone screen about the company It should just work unless there are secrets that have different values than already configured in the default file. Explain previous projects This is a rails specific interview, where you get a rails app and you go through it fixing and creating features. Betterment, I like your company and I will continue using your products, but your onsite interview isn't a test of tech skills, it's a test of Ruby knowledge. Building Diversity And Inclusion At Betterment Change starts at the heart of the matter. Working behind the scenes, the members of our Quantitative Investing team bring our customers the projections and recommendations they rely on for keeping their goals on-track. 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. I interviewed at Betterment. To find a solution, we drew inspiration fromthe component approachused by modern design systems and JavaScript frameworks. Already tried it out? We dont want to terminate workers while theyre finishing something up and instead want them to terminate after the work is done (not accepting new work in the interim). We are built from the ground up on a foundation of data. Key handling and authorization policy design is tricky to get right and sops doesnt do it all for us. When I sat down with them to solicit feedback on our entire hiring process, they pointed to the whiteboard problem-solving dynamics (one to two engineers sitting, observing, and judging the candidate standing at a whiteboard) as unnatural and awkward. While the nascency of Julia as a language means that the community and ecosystem is much smaller than those of other languages, we found that the code and community oversamples on the type of libraries that we care about. Shortening the feedback loop was one of the first steps we took in building out our new platform, and were excited to share the story of how we designed that solution. 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. Our engineering team here at Betterment takes security seriously. When an input or an assumption changes, it should be as easy as re-running the whole thing. Modifying our integration with SimonData in order to bulk update our outgoing emails, and Changing how we share a users name with our customer service (CX) team through a Zendesk integration, as well as in our internal CX application. 4.0availableacrossallstores. 2 Betterment Lead Software Engineer interview questions and 2 interview reviews. Why dont we use Feature Specs? ;) IDE of choice? First proposed by Michael Feathers (who wrote the bible on working with legacy code) these tests simply take a set of verified inputs/outputs from the existing production legacy code and then assert that the output of the new code is the same as the legacy code under the same inputs. Ultimately, using fake plugins works well and makes this a satisfyingly functional testing solution. What kind of monitoring would be necessary to detect such a failure, across all the features of our app, and all the types of jobs it might try to run? So, your college savings fund would get: (310/1000)*1234.56 = 382.7136 We can do the same for your other three accounts, but you may have noticed a problem. Putting this process in code keeps everyone accountable and removes ambiguity about how the final analysis set was reached. 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. In practice, deciding on a job queue is more complicated than that. This may seem less important inside a corporate bubble where everyone has access to the same proprietary platform, but it is at the very least a turnoff to most new talent in the field. Building those small, tight-knit groups promotes relationships that can help the company over time. Designing an Off Ramp Just as we are committed to rolling out large changes in small portions, we are careful to avoid huge changesets on the other side of a release. We believe this is important so that we can quickly tell which secrets an app is dependent on just by opening the file. To solve this programmatically, we adoptedAlembicdatabase migrations to manage these objects through code, allowing us to keep our development, testing, and production Airflow databases consistent. All products, services, and content obtained from a linked website are provided as is without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, security, or accuracy. While we want to iterate rapidly, we strive to never compromise the security of our customers nor the correctness of our code. We valued the ability to encrypt just the secret values themselves and leave the variable name in plain-text. This Is How You Bootstrap a Data Team Data alone is not enoughwe needed the right storytellers. Before working at Betterment, I didnt think finance was relevant to me. We cannot assign Joe more money than he already has, nor can we move money between his Roth IRA and taxable accounts. 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). Tell me about yourself Describe a process you fixed. 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. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY). As an example, consider the following simple Julia function which sorts an array of numbers using theinsertion sortalgorithm: In order to be able to expose this in a shared library, we would wrap it like this: Here weve simplified memory management by requiring the caller to allocate memory for the result, and implemented primitive exception handling (seeChallenges & Pitfallsbelow). We reach our SLO goal if, during a 30 day period, 99.9% of all requests completed with one of those status codes and within that range of latency. Their office is ok-ish. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. So if you can encrypt them safely, you can ship your secrets with your code and have a single change management workflow. This makes the tests run faster, and removes the need for having any special tables that dont get cleaned out. We help high-growth companies, like Lyft, Betterment, and Figma, scale their engineering teams through a more effective, efficient, and equitable interview that's loved by candidates and hiring . I moved to New York after getting an opportunity at Sony and worked for a year producing video content. Technical problems really felt more like they were grounded more in learning your thought process and general development style. Below is a test written in Groovy, which sets up fixture data that mimics the exact situation in our Meet Joe example. One tech phone screen, 5 hrs on site with other team leads, hiring manager, CTO, and a follow-up 2hrs onsite tech interview, offer was made. Have we violated our error budget every month for the past three months? Coming in with experience in only Java, this was definitely a challenging project to tackle. The parent object of any activity inside the Betterment platform is a user transaction that includes deposits or withdrawals for a goal, dividends, allocation changes, transfer of money between goals and so on. If I do the same in SAS, only people willing to spend $10,000 (or more if particular modules are required) can review or extend the project. 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. These arent necessarily true-to-form SLOs but engineers can use this framework and tooling provided to collect data around how their systems are operating and have conversations on prioritization based on what they discover, beginning to build a culture of observability and accountability Conclusion Betterment is at a point in its growth where prioritization has become more difficult and more important. We use a little command line utility to assume the role and are dropped into a secret-editor session where they use sops to add or edit secrets with their editor in the same way they add or edit code in a feature branch. Try to organize analyses in a structure similar to how you present them so that the connection from claims to details is easy to make. Now that the summer has ended, I have accomplished my goal I created five dashboards displaying charts, numbers and maps with valuable data that everyone can see. All products, services, and content obtained from a linked website are provided as is without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, security, or accuracy. Interviews at Betterment Experience Positive 56% Negative 28% Neutral 17% Getting an Interview Applied online 81% Recruiter 6% Employee Referral 6% Difficulty 2.9 Average Hard Average Easy Interviews for Top Jobs at Betterment Software Engineer (18) Customer Experience Associate (8) Product Designer (4) Product Manager (4) And here weare! Some problems, however, are better solved by taking a functional approach. If we were willing to accept tight coupling between our services, specifically in their API contracts, we'd be well-served by a tool like Pact. But I really liked how "organic" these problems were since I got a sense of the actual challenges I would be facing as well as the tools and practices used by the team. In short, we tested a heckuva a lot of data. If its a reasonable addition to CI, our thought is that everyone should benefit. This project would be no exception. We encourage all engineers who want to add to their own CI pipeline to make changes on a branch from ourCoachrepository, where all the configuration generation magic happens, verify its effectiveness for their use-case, and open a pull request. 17.0availableacrossallstores. Beautifully designed technology, built by empathetic, rigorous engineers, is the key to making finance what it ought to be: a means to help people reach better outcomes and live better lives.. Hence, WebValve. We used to use controller specs instead of request specs. For our customers, it should result in better expected, risk-adjusted returns for investments. Additionally, weve included a continuous monitoring process that runs aggregate queries, tagged and grouped by queue and priority, and that emits similar notifications that become gauge metrics. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Separately, they could set up a taxable retirement account invested likewise in 90% stocks and 10% bonds. Similarly, is the dollar amount below the target balance in asset class AC. If youre not seeing numbers you expect, or it is taking a long time to come up with a solution, the initial guess is often the first place to start. As an engineer myself, I was excited to to speak with her after the event about coding, women in tech, and fintech trends. He has greatly inspired me with his go-getter attitude and has always . There's a human conversation and negotiation to be had about these contracts, and you can fool yourself into thinking you don't need to have that conversation if you've got a file that guarantees that you and your collaborator service are speaking the same language; you may be speaking the same words, but you might not infer the same meaning. We're engineering Betterment to become a top-notch fintech company. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. Working with our product team, we determined that the minimum amount of change to consider a page rebranded was adoption of the new header, footer, colors, and fonts. We hone our interview process to ensure youre able to show us your best self. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? As such, our technical interviews switched from whiteboards to computers. In this post, well explore that principle and dive into how we committed 5000 line configuration files to our repositories with confidence by standardizing CI for different runtimes, automating configuration generation in code, and testing the process that generates that configuration. But this kind of explicit, attribute-heavy approach helped us get this tooling off the ground while we developed (and continue to develop) in-code annotation approaches.

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