betterment software engineer interview

The registry is a separate Github repository, and we use tooling from theRegistrator.jlpackage to register new versions. Okay brass tacks. In the process of adopting sops and building sopsorific, we discovered the welcoming community and thoughtful maintainers of sops. Non-CPU intensive tasks (e.g. Were continually evaluating whether to adopt this process for other roles, as well. Dealing With the Uncertainty of Legacy Code To complete our portfolio optimization, we had to tackle a lot of legacy code. (For the record, they stand for The Depository Trust Company, Committee on Uniform Security Identification Procedures, and Automated Customer Account Transfer Service, respectively.) So does the delayed approach scale? A controller-level hook allowed us to easily distinguish which views were to display opt-out mode with a single line of code. On the other hand, some methods are just a means for us to mark content as already safe. Tax efficiency is a key consideration of Betterments portfolio management philosophy. Consider the following controller: So long as a user is authenticated, they can perform the show action on any document (including documents belonging to others!) We talked about my career and what I was looking for. 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. 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. 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. This is where SLOs come in. Commercial Customer Service Representative. Engineers and designers can be confident theyre using something thats been tested and validated across browsers. That means the next step was to build a killer testing framework. The client needs to know almost nothing. Think of something like Heroku, but for engineers here at Betterment. Excel 2013 is capped at just more than 1 million rows. The solutions that come out of that awareness are game-changing. Ruthe Farmer - I first met Ruthe back in 2010 during my senior year of high school when I won the Illinois NCWIT Aspirations Award. These validations are run as a step in our Continuous Integration suite. Ability to keep pace with changes to the mathematical model, e.g., adding, removing, and changing the constraints and the objective function must be quick and painless. First round with Hiring Manager and rejected. CPU optimized) to further reduce costs. 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. Then, we need a route in our frontend for navigating to this page. -> % coach create project --type ruby_app 'coach.yml' configuration file added -- update it based on your project's needs When you run that, the CLI creates the smallcoach.ymlconfiguration definition file discussed earlier. The last of our requirements was to be able to launch into a specific feature rather than having to navigate through the whole app. Weve also covered how our custom cops can help developers avoid antipatterns, resulting in safer and easier to read code. During testing, we often ran into scenarios where our model had no feasible solutionusually due to a bug we had introduced. Everyone was very open about what they thought about the company and about what their experience at the company was like. multi-tenancy), team-level job ownership annotations, resumable bulk orchestration and batch enqueuing of millions of jobs at once, forward-scheduled job throttling, and also the ability to encrypt the inputs to jobs so that they arent visible in plaintext in the database. 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. Paddy, who hosts the meetups, let us know that Betterment was launching an apprenticeship program and after the meetup I asked how I could get involved and applied for the program. 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. Then, we look at the user API callwe define a new route for user, in FakeTrading. Sopsorific bootstraps these KMS keys and IAM roles for a given application. What to Use, and How Short answer: R or Python. These questions open up an entirely different can of worms, one that we would prefer remained firmly sealed. The CircleCI info includes the title of the job that failed (coach_clilint (Gemfile)), the build number (#11389) to reference for context in case there are multiple occurrences of the failure in multiple workflows, a link to the top-level Workflow, and@s for each contributor. If we used a research-first approach to build RetireGuide, the result could have been a planning tool that was mathematically sound but hard for our customers to use. By the way, this is a topic I could talk about endlessly, so Ill leave it there for now. I made the jump to start becoming an engineer. It is also important in our research code where the iterative nature of research means we often have to re-run financial simulations or models multiple times with slight tweaks. NDA signed. - last_updated_date: "2021-02-18" approval_date: "2021-03-02" next_revisit_date: "2021-03-15" category: latency type: monitor description: This SLO covers latency for our CI notifications system - whether it's the github context updates on your PRs or the slack notifications you receive. If its a reasonable addition to CI, our thought is that everyone should benefit. How we wrote our own fake HTTP Client Adapter As I said, we didn't find nock until after we wrote our own solution. We wrote a controller-level hook to update the variant and render the new layout files, reskinning thepackage. So, suffice it to say, at-least-once semantics are crucial in more ways than one, and not all ActiveJob backends provide them. Cross-Database Replication withDMS We used Luigi to extract and load source data from multiple internal databases into ourRedshiftdata warehouse on an ongoing basis. What to say when thingssucceed We didnt change the frequency of messaging for successwe got that right the first time around. If we buried the authorization within the model, it would be difficult to ensure that the trust-root chain is being enforced especially if the model is used by multiple controllers that handle authorization inconsistently. Betterment interview details in New York City, NY: 37 interview questions and 35 interview reviews posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. This algorithm is called theLargest Remainder Method. Any insights would be helpful. In the first post of this series we mention one of our principles,Standardize the Pipeline. It is a historical archive and is not intended to be updated. I started reading Robert Shillers Finance and the Good Society, a book my dad recommended to me months earlier. Interested in engineering at Betterment? Given requirements, explain how one may model some data. Since then, the team has met several times to gather feedback and implement tweaks, but the broad strokes have remained unchanged. My first task involved DTC participants, CUSIPs, and ACATSall terms that Id never heard before. I applied online. By having these changes in version control, each addition to the CI pipeline goes through code review and requires tests be written. Then a light came on. 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. . It's better to ask a question and move forward with your problem than it is to struggle over an answer. In addition to problems arising from the types of questions asked, we saw that one of our primary interview tools, the whiteboard, was actually getting in the way; many candidates struggled to communicate their solutions using a whiteboard in an interview setting. I applied online. We store fake responses with a URI template, a status code, and a body. With sopsorific, secrets for the non-sensitive zone can be made accessible to a broader subset of the app team than sensitive zone secrets helping to eliminate some of bottleneck issues weve experienced with our previous workflow. 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. Another thing we learned was that some vendors provide secrets with lower entropy than wed like for API tokens or access keys and they dont provide the option to choose stronger secrets. As a Rails shop, we already make heavy use of RuboCop. Allow folks outside of the SRE team to contribute to CI. Any insights would be helpful. If I do an analysis with open-source tools like R or Python, I can post full end-to-end instructions that anyone in the world can reproduce, check, and expand upon. Okay, weve got an app, a test harness, and robots to interact with the screens. How it works now Now that we knowwhocan do what, lets talk abouthow they can do what they can do. How We Engineered Betterments Tax-Coordinated Portfolio For our latest tax-efficiency feature, Tax Coordination, Betterments solver-based portfolio management system enabled us to manage and test our most complex algorithms. This process added extra validation, testing, and optimizations, helping us to create the most accurate advice in our end product. Heres an example configuration section for a single job, the linter job for our Coach repository: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/4b4a11acbe5a78022ecba62cb99aa85a And heres an example of the Ruby code that helps generate that result: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/a96f3a79239988298207b7ec72e2ed04 For each job that is defined in the.circleci/config.ymlfile, according to the project types list of acceptance criteria, we include additional steps to handle notifications and test reporting. First, we want an address model, which we map to our /addresses endpoint. Please query for the associated record in a way that enforces authorization (e.g. One Massive Monte Carlo, One Very Efficient Solution We optimized our portfolio management algorithms in six hours for less than $500. 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. They're an answer to the question "how can we approximate end-to-end tests for a fraction of the cost?" Straightforward tests are easy to write, read, and maintain. We use Python more for data pipeline processes and R more for modeling, analyses, and reporting. This blog post discusses the different responsibilities of these types of specs, and other related high level guidelines for specs. Transitioning from Luigi toAirflow Our single-server approach usedLuigi, a Python module created to orchestrate long-running batch jobs with dependencies. 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. As we see it, the members of Team Polaris are the bards of a data narrative that help the organization grow while delivering a top-tier product. But so is reliability and performance. Consistency is key, said Jesse. Regardless, given that it has the same problems that flutter_driver does, we decided not to pursue integration_test as our framework. How often did we want to be notified by the notification system when our tests that tested the code that built the notification system, succeeded? As of July 2016, all full-stack, mobile, and site-reliability engineering roles have adopted this new approach. Our hope is that linking out to this post and its associated Rules will reinforce a strong security posture in our application development. At Betterment, were working on our own set of initiatives to drive the conversation. Heres a simplified version of our upstart configuration. For many trans folks like myself, this is the name assigned at birth which means all legal and government issued IDs and documents use this non-affirming name. Sharing code in a common environment also enables the reuse of modular analysis components. Through fixing the tests, we learned lessons that could help others have a less painful migration themselves. One system spec that asserts the happy path will be sufficient for most features. This question can help the interviewer determine if you have the skills necessary to succeed in this role. 2.5 hr final onsite - behavioral (I did not make it here, but recruiter told me schedule beforehand), Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, I applied online. 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. Explore. Then we do the same for the deposit API call. I applied online. You want to allocate your bonus proportionally in the same way you allocate your regular paychecks. CI plays an important role in all of our teams workflows. Come work side-by-side with our team, laptops open, and solve problems together. We have a strong preference to use a single integration pattern for both internal and external service integrations; this reduces cognitive overhead for devs. internal services) we have full control over how we build them, so using HTTP and REST is no issue. In system specs, each test is wrapped in a database transaction because its run within a Rails process, which means we dont need to use the DatabaseCleaner gem anymore. To implement this pattern, we use AmazonS3as a persistent storage tier. Cassidy Williams, Venmo engineer, said impostor syndrome tends to be more common in high-achieving women. Building Diversity And Inclusion At Betterment Change starts at the heart of the matter. 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. At Betterment, were required by the government to have a record of a customers legal first name, but that shouldnt prevent us from letting customers share their preferred or chosen first name, and then using that name in the appropriate places. Code Review Our last line of defense is code review. 3 step process for me: We included realistic dividends at an asset class level. The last important hurdle is native plugins. This freedom from legacy stylesheets and markup were critical to building and clearly demonstrating the new brand and value proposition we wanted to demonstrate to the world. (Legal helpfully reviewed these principles months ago, but then I had my first child, and, as you can imagine, priorities shifted.) Betterment is an engineering-driven company that has developed the most-trusted online financial advisor based on the principles of optimization and efficiency. Questions Interviews are now more prescriptive regarding non-technical questions. I interviewed at Betterment. But the reality of even a fully "scaled up" queue solution is that, if it is doing anything particularly interesting, it is likely to be database-bound. And we've even written on why we did it. Betterments framework for locally developing and testing service-oriented apps in isolation with WebMock and Sinatra-based fakes. The process took 7 weeks. 2. The process took 3 weeks. Being able to run our financial models within our customers Web browsers ensures an instant user experience and eliminates any server lag or CPU-concerns. We may also have some interactions with native code through a plugin such as image_cropper. In addition, Rails has a few methods that provide help in escaping content. Engineers' productivity and happiness decrease as even the smallest tasks can be frustrating and time-consuming. Late one night, we started bouncing ideas off each other on how to pull it off. You are viewing a web property located at Betterment.com. To keep the momentum going, we needed to transition towards a service-oriented architecture that would allow the engineers of different business units to run in parallel against their specific business goals, creating even more demand for repeatable solutions to service integration. This keeps the tests feeling familiar to normal screen tests since the exposed interface is very similar to how widget tests are written. AWS KMS doesanchoredencryption right. It's not quite the interactive experience of the Datadog UI, but it's fairly straightforward to fiddle in the UI and then extract the resulting configuration and add it to our config file. 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. I happened to be in the market, but I had a rush timeline as I already have few offers on the table and need to made a decision within a week. 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? I interviewed at Betterment in Feb 2021, 3 weeks total, (4 if you make it to final onsite, each interview occured on a separate week) Feature specs are also absent from our guide. When we set up a new plugin and we wrap it in a class that we inject into our app. In my experience, the best approach was to jump in and rewrite a small piece of code that was not tested, and then add tests for the rewritten portion appropriately. And for our server, we need to add a route, a controller, a model, and a jbuilder to render that model as JSON. Quite a bit more complicated, because each backend framework provides its own set of trade-offs and guarantees, many of which will have far-reaching implications in our codebase. While we didnt run a scientifically valid split-test for the new process versus the old (it wouldve taken years to reach statistical significance), our hiring metrics have improved across the board. To do this, we can relate the terms with the terms using linear constraints. Julia ticks the box for this requirement as well by using ajust-in-time compilerthat accommodates both interactive and non-interactive workflows well. This contribution was merged as well. While we love the concern that our engineers show toward solving these problems, these deviations became problematic for applications of the same runtime that should abide by the same set of rules; for example, all Ruby apps should runRSpecandRubocop, not just some of them. Changing workflows and acquiring new skills is always an investment, but the dividends here are better collaboration, efficient iteration, transparency in process and confidence in the claims and recommendations you make. The second area we wanted to stub out was the network. On the one end is 100% test coverage using all the different kinds of tests: solitary unit tests, sociable more-integrated tests, and end-to-end tests; all features, fully covered, no exceptions. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? Legacy code is a form of technical debtthe sooner it gets fixed, the less time it will take to fix in the future. Determination of most trusted online financial advisor reflects Betterment LLC's distinction of having the most customers in the industry, made in reliance on customer counts, self-reported pursuant to SEC rules, across all online-only registered investment advisors. Many of them took the time to draw diagrams and timelines to accompany their explanations. It starts with our users - Betterment users - and trying to provide them with a certain quality of service. For this problem, we made our initial guess to be what each store had in stock, and we supplied it to the minimize method as a list. 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. Interviews are now more prescriptive regarding non-technical questions. 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. Write some jobs, pick a queue backend with a few desirable features (priorities, queues, etc), run some job worker processes, and were off to the races! To help us with that, we took things a step further and wrote a wrapper around sops we call sopsorific. Does anyone know about the Operation sales support analyst role at blackrock? Modeling and implementing our portfolio management algorithms using linear programming was not easy, but it ultimately resulted in the simplest possible system needed to reliably pursue optimal after-tax returns. To answer that question, Ill leave you with one last takeaway. Aside from partials, there was corresponding styling, or CSS, that was being copied and sometimes changed when these shared partials were altered. First was with 2 members on the team, last was with a manager. Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. This is why Betterment has a rule requiring UUIDs for all new tables. We already do something like this for some jobs with our journaled gem, which uses AWS Kinesis to funnel event payloads out to our data warehouse (while at the same time benefiting from the same at-least-once delivery guarantees as our other jobs!). We originally ran our data platform on a single machine in 2015 when we ingested far less data with fewer consumer-facing requirements. We Scrum, we Git, and we Jenkins. 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. By default, sopsorific wants to be configured with a production (sensitive zone) secrets file and a default (non-sensitive zone) secrets file. We cannot assign Joe more money than he already has, nor can we move money between his Roth IRA and taxable accounts. For example, we can tag an element with a data-behavior-dropdown, and then we have some simple, well organized global JavaScript that knows how to wrap that element in some code that makes it more interactive. Do error rates for this particular endpoint directly reflect an experience of a user in some way - be it a customer, a customer-facing API, or a Betterment engineer? Then, a group of engineers from each squad began tackling each deprecation one by one. At first glance the places where we used #firstname in-app seemed minimalemails, in-app greetings, tax documents. Taking the time to understand the code and write tests before refactoring will save you headaches in the future. We find each integer quotient and remainder by multiplying the inflow by the weight and dividing by the total weight. Having a tool to protect ourselves from ourselves is vital to our workflow. The first of these issues was that the cop allowed usage ofrawandhtmlsafewhen the usages were wrapped insafejoin. The rebranded version of our applications core layout imported the new CSS file and just like that, we were in business. As such, our technical interviews switched from whiteboards to computers. If youd like, you can skip ahead to the tools before continuing on to the rest of this post. Thirdly, we don't want to have shared code across service boundaries. Rails makes escaping contenteasier Rails escapes content by default in some scenarios, including whentag helpersare used. The process took 2 weeks. What do you think are the biggest trends of our time in this space? He had great communication, was organized and empathetic, remembered things I said weeks earlier, etc. What parameters is the authenticated user submitting? While migrating from Luigi to Airflow is not yet complete, Airflow has already offered us a solid foundation. This is useful for API calls that always behave the same way, like POSTs that return no body, and to provide a working foundation of responses.

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