betterment software engineer interview betterment software engineer interview

32.0availableacrossallstores. It took eight hours a day of working on a personal finance product for me to notice that the iceberg was even there. What genre of music do you listen to when youre coding? It is notoriously hard to estimate the complexity of a task when it needs to be built into or on top of a legacy system. The process took 1 week. We began with thispull requestto patch the first issuechange the behavior of the cop to recognizerawandhtmlsafeas violations regardless of being wrapped insafejoin. The key to the success of this project was to keep the build simple, maintain a low risk of regressions, and ensure a clear path to remove the legacy brand code after launch. SLOs (service level objectives) - including managing their error budgets - will permit us - our product engineering teams - to have the right conversations and make the right decisions about prioritization and resourcing so that we can balance our efforts spent on reliability and new product features, helping to ensure the long term happiness and confidence of our users (and engineers). If its a reasonable addition to CI, our thought is that everyone should benefit. That means the next step was to build a killer testing framework. These are some of the most popular tools in each language organized by their layer in your full-stack analysis workflow: Full Stack Analysis R Python Environment RStudio iPython / Jupyter, PyCharm Sourcing Data RMySQL, rpostgresql, rvest, RCurl, httr MySQLdb,requests, bs4 Cleaning, Reshaping and Summarizing data.table, dplyr pandas Analysis, Model Building, Learning see CRAN Task Views NumPy, SciPy, Statsmodels, Scikit-learn Visualization ggplot2, ggvis, rCharts matplotlib, d3py, Bokeh Reporting RMarkdown, knitr, shiny, rpubs IPython notebook Sourcing Data If there is any ambiguity in this step, the whole analysis stack can collapse on the foundation. The process took 3 weeks. It needed to be able to organize the different server endpoints (and its data) into models, as well as know how to take those models and render them into views. Were working to become the most-loved financial services company of a generation, and it starts with our engineers. Write unit tests for a piece of the method, then refactor that piece. I applied online. Onsite they give you a mock project where you have to complete the requirements. This, in theory, means that all jobs can be written in more or less the same way, regardless of the job-execution backend. 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. Unfortunately, our google-fu was bad and we didn't find anything until after we went and implemented something ourselves. We created an open-source project called Blazer to work as an extension of the Backbone router. While we tried to construct computer science and data modelling problems that led to informative interviews, watching candidates solve these problems still wasnt getting to the heart of whether theyd be successful engineers once at Betterment. Software engineering jobs tend to fall under two categories: domain-specific or general programming. Working with Betterments applications gave me a hands-on understanding of concepts that are hard to reproduce on a smaller, personal application level. Just the portfolio transition work alone includes significant new code for front-end enhancements which have nothing to do with trading. 2 hr ByteBoard interview - 40 min design and algorithms (know your standard data structures and algorithms), 70 mins implementing some methods We cannot just assign arbitrarily large values to the decision variables due to two restrictions which cannot be violated: Joe must maintain $11,000 in his taxable account and $5,500 in his Roth IRA. 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. 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 did this by providing well-defined interfaces that give engineers access to core system data needed to generate our model. Lets walk through this process for our example: Remember that were working in cents, so our inflow is 123456 and we need to allocate it across bucket weights of [31000, 35000, 20000, 14000]. This is because both of the cops keep a little bit of state to ensure they have the appropriate context necessary when analyzing potentially unsafe function calls. Seemed mostly focused on identifying your work style. For instance, at Betterment, we faced the challenge of allocating a sum of money proportionally across multiple buckets. Pretty Easy. 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. Unfortunately, if it were so simple we wouldnt be here, several paragraphs into a blog post on the topic. Isolating New Code with ActionPack Variants ActionPack variantsprovide an elegant solution to rolling out significant front end changes. This blog post discusses the different responsibilities of these types of specs, and other related high level guidelines for specs. "trust-root chaining"), and then pass the resulting object into your model instead of the unsafe parameter. Your development is our priority. Option 2: Port the R Code to JavaScript Because our Web application already makes extensive use of JavaScript, another option was to implement our R financial models in JavaScript and run all calculations client-side, on the end users Web browser. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY). In the process of adopting sops and building sopsorific, we discovered the welcoming community and thoughtful maintainers of sops. And here weare! 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. Engineering Jobs at Betterment Building the future of finance The engineering spirit, the drive to craft and build the quality service for our customers that we dream and crave for ourselves, is how Betterment began, and it's how we'll shape the future. One problem was purely coding while the other involved system design on the whiteboard. Through dependency injection, the new generator is included among the set of generators used to generate constraints. We can do that by just passing our own fake versions into the app. While speed of execution is important, we also require a dynamic language that allows us to test out new ideas and prototype rapidly. Find out what is missing from the rails app. Straightforward tests are easy to write, read, and maintain. When we set up a new plugin and we wrap it in a class that we inject into our app. - Final interview, stay on one project, swap groups of different interviewers. All of it is kept together with frameworks that allow the different pieces to communicate with each other, and there are servers that the app needs to run on.This was extremely eye-opening for me, and Im so glad that the engineers at Betterment spent time during my first week getting me up to speed on all of it. I applied online. 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. And leaving it up to engineers to own their own configuration lets folks modify the file in an unsupported way which could break their CI process. It's a joke feed, but they have some great tech and security points and articles shared there. With hundreds of constraints and hundreds of thousands of unique tax profiles across our customer base, we needed to be confident that our system made the right decisions in the right situations. This gives us a class in a conventional location that inherits from WebValve::FakeService. It made an optimal user experience possible. 15.00% 6.000lbsofnoodles. Perhaps the simplest is to have the Ruby side allocate the memory into which the Julia function should write its result (and pass the Julia function a pointer to that memory). Ship It If your mobile iOS app also displays sensitive information and uses Touch ID for biometry-based local authentication, join us in making the easy adaption to delight your users with full support for Face ID on the iPhone X. Looking for the best java software engineer interview questions to ask candidates during your hiring process? 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. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY). Whatever the case may be, this shouldnt deter them from collecting data. The beginning of our Flutter testing journey Up until early 2020, our mobile app was entirely native with separate android and iOS codebases. Common stages of the interview process at Betterment according to 99 Glassdoor interviews include: Find a Great First Job to Jumpstart Your Career, Stand Out From the Crowd With the Perfect Cover Letter, How to Prepare for Your Interview and Land the Job. First was with 2 members on the team, last was with a manager. I found coding super similar from a composition and structure perspective, which allowed me to tap into the creative side of coding. We also maintain two other dashboards in our cloud monitoring service, DataDog. 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. I feel like if the tone was set immediately, or if i just got an email rejection, it would've hurt a lot less, but it was so cheery up until the "unfortunately we have decided not to move forward with your application" that it hit like a sack of bricks. Finally, weve added an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessionanother idea provided by our Women in Technology group. With this blank slate in front of us we were able to iterate quickly by manually adding different jobs and steps to that file. The process took 2 weeks. 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! I avoided commenting on projects and making suggestions because I thought that my insight would just be dumb, and not necessary. And our platform needed to grow along with it. Using Targeted Universalism To Build Inclusive Features The best products are inclusive at every stage of the design and engineering process. Working closely with Product, Design, Marketing, and Research, we brainstorm, ideate, build, and push our thinking and perspectives. The first step in this translation was to deprecate our not-very-descriptively named #firstname method and push engineers to start using two new, descriptive methods called #legalfirstname and #commonfirstname (#commonfirstname is essentially a defaulting method that falls back to #legalfirstname if #preferredfirst_name is not present for that user). We love the idea of these tests, the level of confidence they'd give us that our app works as intended, and how they'd eliminate manual QA testing, but we loathe the cost of running them, both in terms of time and actual $$$ of CI execution. query: # (total_events - bad_events) over total_events == good_events/total_events numerator: sum:trace.rack.request.hits{service:coach,env:production,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count()-sum:trace.rack.request.errors{service:coach,env:production,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count() denominator: sum:trace.rack.request.hits{service:coach,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count() We love having these SLOs defined in GitHub because we can track who's changing them, how they're changing, and get review from peers. When I started at Betterment (the company) five years ago, Betterment (the platform) was a monolithic Java application. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. Check it out on GitHub. How detailed should our messages be? And this bounty of information helps a lot if the engineer has multiple PRs open and needs to quickly switch context. Abletocarry12.0pounds. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? And unfortunately, its not possible to run a local service mesh on a laptop without it melting. The focus of our work has been on delivering a platform as a service to make sense of the complex process of CD. However, we realized there were some issues with the opinions the cop held about some of these methods. For each project type we knew we would need to support: Static code analysis Unit tests Integration tests Build steps Test reports We define the specific jobs a project will run during CI by looking at theprojecttypevalue inside a projectscoach.yml. Overall, the process was great. With spreadsheet software in every cubicle, analytical horsepower was commoditized and Excel jockeys were crowned as the arbiters of truth in business. It is your responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, timeliness and completeness of any information available on a linked website. 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. Using our new platform to build and test code would allow our engineers to receive automated feedback sooner so they could iterate faster. 1 Betterment Software Engineering interview questions and 1 interview reviews. This works well from a development perspective, but we soon faced the question of how best to integrate this code with our production code, which is mostly developed in Ruby. As an avid saver, Joe quickly reached his annual Roth IRA contribution limit of $5,500. Each project needs a configuration definition file (coach.yml) that declares its project_type. Controllers utilizing the opt_out hook made their way onto a to-do list for this work without the stress of a deadline. Any questions for me? 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. 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. 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. If the service doesnt work as intended, no user (or engineer) will be happy. Our allocation code doesnt need to care that were looking to allocate money, just that were looking to allocate integers. 4. I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. I had two exceptional mentors who went above and beyond and removed any blocks preventing me from accomplishing tasks. To ensure true randomness, always pass random as the seed. We can use WebMock to wire the fake to requests that match a certain pattern. Maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. You'll also practice critically evaluating your own code, and you'll build technical communication skills that will help you prepare for job interviews and collaborative work as a software engineer. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. Given requirements and interface, provide an implementation All we need is the server. The contract defines the expectations of input and output for the exchange. All coding exercises were real world examples, no leetcode or theoretical problem solving questions. This allows the view to be reusable. In general, our CI platform categorizes projects into applications and libraries and divides those up further by language runtime. The take home and both onsite interview questions were not arbitrary but very practical and relevant to what I'd actually be working on. As such, our technical interviews switched from whiteboards to computers. I didnt know 401(k)s were employer-sponsored. This was about 3 hours, 2 - 1 hour paired programming exercises with members of the team, and a 30 minute conversation/soft skills interview with the hiring manager. Or perhaps we notice that what were measuring is becoming increasingly irrelevant to a customer experience, and we can get rid of the SLO entirely! Before working at Betterment, I didnt think finance was relevant to me. These are REALLY basic things that you can do if you have some rails experience, but if its your first time looking at it, you're SOL, and your interviewers will at best try to nudge you to the right documentation page to read mid interview. Before my internship, finance, to me, was a field in which some of my peers would work more hours than I had hours of consciousness. I interviewed at Betterment. For the screen for changing your name and byline, we can build a robot to interact with the screen that looks something like this: By using this pattern, we are able to reuse test code pertaining to this screen across many tests. 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. You can also watch myRails at Scale talkto learn why we developed them and how we maintain them. While the series focuses on programming for women and those who identify as women, it is inclusive to everyone in our community who wish to be allies and support our mission. I didn't connect too well with one of the managers in the final round and saw the rejection coming. The need for new elements in our views is not going to simply vanish because we rebranded, so this makes us more prepared for the future. This can make scheduling difficult, but in a city as competitive as New York is for engineering talent, weve found it valuable to get to the final offer stage as quickly as possible. 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. A good analysis excludes them based on objective rules from the beginning and then tests for sensitivity to these exclusions later. 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. Ultimately I decided to go with the other company because the team I'll be joining is newly forming and there's an outsized opportunity to have a big impact. I applied through a recruiter. Theres actually a critical security bug here that allows the client to specify any attachment_id, even if they dont own that attachment - eek! We already use ACID-compliant datastores to solve these precise kinds of data persistence issues, so with the exception of really, really high volume operations (where a lot of noise and data loss canor mustbe tolerated), theres really no reason not to enqueue jobs co-transactionally with other data changes. Scalable There are hard technical limits to how large an analysis you can do in a spreadsheet. Also, we are providing the constraints as tuple of dictionaries. Product and DesignMeet the other teammates, 5. Test, repeat, test. In Summary Unlike authentication, authorization is context specific and difficult to abstract away from the leaf nodes of application code. I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. Linear programs try to optimize the value of an objective function. Any improvements you've brought to your current team? To avoid this, youll probably want to implement catch-all exception handling in your shared library exposed functions that will catch any exceptions that occur and return some context about the error to the caller (minimally, a boolean indicator of success/failure). Why dont we use Controller Specs? The optimization package were using in this example, pythons scipy.optimize, provides a very expressive interface for specifying all of those bounds and constraints. At first glance, it looks like the developer has taken the right steps to adhere to Rule #1 via the document method and were using strong params, is that enough? On the Ruby end, we built agemwhich wraps our Julia library and attaches to it usingRuby-FFI. You will need to be passingly familiar with the language they're using. She and I have been talking with each other at events and conferences and meetups (and even just online) almost weekly since then about getting more girls into tech, working, and everything in between. Addition information Since we introduced our internal Rails component code, a fantastic open-source project emerged,Komponent, as well as a really great and in-depth blog post on component systems in Rails fromEvil Martians. The flag takes a seed that can be one of two things, either a 32 bit unsigned integer or the word random. Jenkins is a powerful tool and well-used in the industry, but we decided to cut it because the way that we were using it was wrong, we werent pleased with its feature set, and there was too much technical debt to overcome. Onsite they give you a mock project where you have to complete the requirements. Our initial task was to interview internal stakeholders to get at their data-related pain points. We would receive immediate feedback in the CircleCI interface when those jobs ran, and this feedback loop helped us iterate even faster. Optimal Testing Because we use these three different categories of specs, its important to keep in mind what each type of spec is for to avoid over-testing. 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. Company Executive1:1 on your background and the company. We want to be able to define fakes in a single place, so when we add a new one, we can easily find it and change it. The Code Solution: Make It Functional Given we have to manage penny allocations between a persons goals often throughout our codebase, the last thing wed want is to have to bake penny-pushing logic throughout our domain logic. I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. 2 Technical interviews, followed by an AMA style lunch and then behavioral interviews for the rest of the day. In other words, the following test file will always exit successfully, despite the fact that there are obvious issues with how its set up. Less JavaScript. Heres what we considered: We made sure we knew its purpose. That meant no guaranteed connection to a cloud service mesh. More broadly, a 2015 survey of large businesses in the UK reported that 17% had experienced direct financial losses because of spreadsheet errors. 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. In this case, our second test is relying on the side effects of the first test. It is a read-only, star-schema representation of fact and dimensional tables for growth subject areas. If youd like, you can skip ahead to the tools before continuing on to the rest of this post. Here's how they did it. Different approaches are possible. We also wanted a consistent framework by which we could write these tests. Stay tuned. For Java apps and libraries we run integration and unit tests by default as well asPMDas part of our static code analysis. All the info I provided is given to you at the time of the interview. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. Rather than getting together to hear presentations, meetups are designed to have a group-led dynamic. Phone interview was a typical phone screening some personal questions to make sure your experience matches the role. What to say when thingssucceed We didnt change the frequency of messaging for successwe got that right the first time around. Back in the Day Heres how our interview process once looked: Resum review Initial phone screen Technical phone screen Onsite: Day 1 Technical interview (computer science fundamentals) Technical interview (modelling and app design) Hiring manager interview Onsite: Day 2 Product and design interview Company founder interview Company executive interview While this process helped in growing our engineering team, it began showing some cracks along the way. Fortunately, it was a fun experience and it really took very little time! Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. The content on this page is reflective of a specific point in time (as of the publication date). Lets talk about why you chose Betterment. 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. What to Use, and How Short answer: R or Python. During our testing, we ran over 200,000 simulations of 12 daily level returns of our 12 asset classes for 20 year's worth of returns. And on top of all that, is the front end code. 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. I was also invited back the following week to speak with another product person and the CTO. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? Every component is on brand and consistent with every other app, feels polished, high quality and requires lower effort to implement. What if SLOs dont make sense yet? Betterment was super supportive and accommodating. The messaging that happened for failures when you merged a pull request into master was a little different in that it included mentions for the relevant contributors (maybe all of them, if we were lucky! The last straw for using whiteboards came from feedback provided by Betterments Women in Technology group. We quickly realized it was too much. For example, thecharacter is escaped using>, and the&character is escaped using&. Keeping Our Code Base Simple, Optimally Betterment engineers turned regulatory compliance rules into an optimization problem to keep the code base simple. Cleaning up the most looked at metrics helped the organization speak to and understand key data in a consistent manner. Interview questions for Junior Software Engineer will help you succeed in your interview. Betterment sits at the intersection of finance and technologytwo industries with large, historical diversity gaps, including women and underrepresented populations. While new products can often be achieved using our existing engineering abstractions, TCP brought the engineering team a new level of complexity that required us to rethink how parts of our portfolio management system were built. From a list of strings, print them out in groups that are anagrams of each other. For us, that meant having clear, readable tests that were a joy to write. Using a separate CSS manifest with the core changes enumerated above, we felt free to dedicate resources to more thoroughly rebranding our high traffic experiences, deferring improvements to pages that received the initial reskin until after launch. Explore our engineering community and nerd out with us on all things tech. Where a widget test will run in a fraction of a second to a second, one of these integration tests will take many seconds. Each project needs to be built, tested, and linted. But, if Elaine was set up a certain way, we wanted to go back to Jerry and adjust the decisions we made for him. That's what we do here at Betterment, come join us! 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. to share a version of the Ruby-API package with the Ruby gem which wraps it) we also maintain a private package registry. These views can also leverageRails view yieldfunctionality when needed. By partnering with Peoplism and building a long-term, action-oriented plan, were working to create real change in a sustainable fashion. One next step were excited about is an examination of our mentorship program to make sure that everyone at Betterment has access to mentors. Personal finance is not something many college students think aboutpartially because its not taught in school and partially because we dont have any money to worry about anyway. (To any Java devs reading this: let us know if that interests you!) Face ID permissions prompt without (left) and with (right) an NSFaceIDUsageDescription string included in the Info.plist This compatibility mode prompt is undesirable enough on its own, but it also clued us into the need to check for potential security concerns opened up by this forwards-compatibility-by-default from Apple. But what happens when our workers are busy with other work during a deploy? The second of these issues was that the cop prevented usages ofrawandhtmlsafe, but did not prevent usages ofsafeconcat. Apply the learnings to future The less legacy code we have, the less we have to deal with the aforementioned processes. 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.