Questions Interviews are now more prescriptive regarding non-technical questions. Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, and iPhone are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. Betterment assumes no responsibility or liability whatsoever for the content, accuracy, reliability or opinions expressed in a third-party website, to which a published article links (a linked website). In the next post of this series on CD, well explore how we committed 5000 line configuration files to our repositories with confidence by standardizing CI for different runtimes, automating config generation in code, and testing that code generation. By only using the server as a JSON API, the frontend needed to know exactly what to do with that JSON. Sometimes, it's a good idea to think outside the box in order to strike the right balance of test coverage, confidence, and maintainability. The phenomenon, Williams said, is something that she has seen particularly among high-achieving womenwhere self-doubt becomes an obstacle for professional development. Its all grounded in developing the best solutions for our customers and helping them achieve financial wellness. From an applications perspective, this relationship between a biometric scanner and the Secure Enclave is simplified to a boolean response. High quality code. The engineer also left time to take questions and he came off as honest about the pros and cons of his experience. Search. And here weare! Maintaining a Data Dictionary wiki became a part of our Definition of Done. The input data was serialized and automatically fed back into our test fixtures. Joe isnt one to take huge risks, so he opted for a moderate asset allocation of 50% stocks and 50% bonds in both his Roth IRA and taxable accounts. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY). This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. Below is a test written in Groovy, which sets up fixture data that mimics the exact situation in our Meet Joe example. Lets consider a hypothetical customer account example. Dell question - Implement a distributed lock for large-scale cluster. Creating a tighter feedback loop Even though our move to create an in-house data team was a natural part of our own engineering team evolution here at Betterment, its still something of a risky unknown for most companies. I recommend going back to LC style questions in the interview or at least have a couple of mock projects ready in several languages similar to the take home test. If an engineer has a monitor tied to metrics or APM, then they just need to plug in the monitor ID directly into our SLO yaml interface. Server Javascript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App. Anything that didnt get a new, rebranded template stayed in the world of plain old production. In short, our devs needed to be able to run individual services in isolation; by default they were set to communicate with one another, meaning an engineer would have to run all of the services locally in order to work on any one service. As demonstrated, Rails provides some methods that mark content as safe without escaping it for us. Anonymous Interview Candidate in Columbia, MD, I applied online. It wasnt enough. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. However, if your tests arent run in random order, you may have a false sense of confidence that the assertions youre making in them are actually accurate. Combined together we call this aproject_type. Code Review Our last line of defense is code review. As an avid saver, Joe quickly reached his annual Roth IRA contribution limit of $5,500. There is still one single point of failure left in our Airflow architecture though: the scheduler. If we arent alerting on those 3 hours of errors, and instead just once if we exceed that limit, then we can direct our attention toward new product features, platform improvements, or learning and development. This rule speaks to the broader goal of authorization being obvious in our code. 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. AWS KMS doesanchoredencryption right. If you had prior experience with these languages the problems are easy to solve. That's what we do here at Betterment, come join us! Needless to say I definitely wish I could stay and work with Betterment rather than going back to school next week, but todays society is under the strange impression that a college degree is important, so I guess Ill finish it out. Because this was entry level, experience with specific languages were not required and interviewers were very helpful with syntax as long as you knew what steps were needed to solve the problem. They are very specific, testing a small portion of the system (the model under test), and cover a wide range of corner cases in that area. Think critically about what each type of spec is intended to be doing while writing specs. Jesse Harrelson: Coding became a hobby for me when I would make websites for my bands in Nashville, but after meeting up with more and more people in tech in the city, I knew it was something I wanted to do as a career. Our dashboards, displayed on large screen TVs and visible by all, were the first to be relabeled and remodeled. Companies should strive for a fair balance between adding new features and refactoring legacy code, and should establish a culture where thoughtful code design is a priority. When working on these cops, we narrowed down false positives to two scenarios: The flagged code could be considered insecure only in other contexts: e.g. In the future, expect to read more from our team about how we use our data insights to drive product and growth development at Betterment. When I started my engineering internship at Betterment, I barely knew anything about finance. After that there was a first round interviews with 2 software engineers and 1 manager totaling about 2.5 hours. The coding question had some nice analogies back to the database Q&A and I got the impression it was a well thought-out phone screen. These represent integer ranges (entirely orthogonal to queues), and default to interactive (0-9), user visible (10-19), eventual (20-29), and reporting (30+), with default alerting thresholds focused on retry attempts and runtime. The contract files themselves are about the syntax and structure of requests and responses rather than the interpretation. 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. This means that your college savings fund gets $382.71, your car fund gets $432.10, your house fund gets $246.91, and your safety net gets $172.84. Building and maintaining the worlds largest independent robo-advisor requires a world-class team of human engineers. And then were back to square one. From here, we do the things we couldnt do beforepull real parameters out of the requests and feed them back into the fake response to make it more realistic. Instead of four analysts all inventing their own method for loading and cleaning a table of users, you can share as a group the utils/LoadUsers() function and ensure you are talking about the same people at every meeting. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? safejoinescapes the content and returns aSafeBuffer(a String flagged as safe) containing it. Cleaning up the most looked at metrics helped the organization speak to and understand key data in a consistent manner. The next thing we needed to decide was what user experiences we actually wanted to test with our integration tests. This kind of scaffolding allowed us to go in and out of the current platform to capture and store precise inputs and outputs, while isolating them away from any unnecessary stuff that wasnt relevant to the core trading processes. Shh Its a Secret: Managing Secrets at Betterment Opinionated secrets management that helps us sleep at night. I had a very pleasant experience interviewing with the team at Betterment. But the point is that jobs are never simply dropped, or silently deleted, or lost to the cyber-aether, at any point, from the moment we enqueue them to their eventual resolution. While theyre not engineers, their jobs definitely involve a good amount of coding. There are plenty of other features that weve built that havent made it into the delayed gem quite yet. Server JavaScript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App Betterment engineers recently migrated a single-page backbone app to a server-driven Rails experience. Interview was 30 mins. 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. Monitors in code Engineers can choose either StatsD or Micrometer to measure complicated experiences with custom metrics, and theres various approaches to turning those metrics directly into monitors within Datadog. Below is an example of one of our components, the flash. Out of 7 offers my decision came down to between Betterment and another company. Learn with us and from us, and while youre at it, teach us what you know. Pages are built from a collection of components that are shared across pages, but can be expanded upon or manipulated in the context of the page theyre on. Betterment is one of them. We can click on any of these links and know exactly where they go based on the logoof the service. How We Modeled the Problem The fundamental questions the engineering team tried to answer were: How do we get our customers to this optimal state, and how do we maintain it in the presence of daily account activity? Weve talked before about how making sure everything is running perfectly -- especially given all the cases we need to handle -- makes us cringe at the cyclomatic complexityof some of our methods. All the new features were working on for customers with multiple accountsbe they Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), taxable investment accounts, trusts, joint accounts, or even synced outside accountsrequired this change. We were able to overcome this and begin filling out the middle level of our testing pyramid by adding structure on top of the widget testing API that allows us to test full flows from start to finish. Were continually evaluating whether to adopt this process for other roles, as well. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. While S3 is great for production, its a little difficult to work with in development and testing where we prefer to use the local filesystem. By default, sopsorific wants to be configured with a production (sensitive zone) secrets file and a default (non-sensitive zone) secrets file. There needs to be a way to set up a new project. 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. Dont Do By keeping test dependencies tightly scoped to where theyre used, we avoid the possibility that a test will be added or changed in such a way that impacts the tests previously consuming the dependency. This rule is applicable for all controller actions and is a critical component of our security story. Linear programs try to optimize the value of an objective function. By default, running flutter testwill run your tests in the order theyre written within your test file. At Betterment, our end goal is to always combine both. The best way to avoid legacy code is to make a best effort at not writing it in the first place. By knowing that the Coach app is aruby_appwe know how many jobs will need to be run and when. In this case, our second test is relying on the side effects of the first test. At a high level, these cops track user input (via params.permit et al.) First, an idiomatic setup stance. Investing the time to run Airflow as a cluster versus a single machine allows us to run work in a more elastic manner, saving costs and using optimized hardware for particular jobs. Tip 1: Assume every test within a test file will run first The first snippet above highlights the anti-pattern of assuming a consistent test execution order. We used to use controller specs instead of request specs. Messages about failures are nowactionableandfull of context,prompting the engineer to participate in CI,to go directly to their failures or to their PR. High quality code. Perhaps wed want to generalize the approach even further. The minimize function takes this in as a list of tuples where the indices line up with x. This post is part of series of articles written by Betterments 2013 summer interns. Some javascript questions about scoping and how to build an app. We arent getting rid of all the JavaScript in our application. This led us to pursue an integration testing solution for flutter. 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. 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 . In either case, Julia is usually able to generate performant compiled code that we can run in production. At Betterment, we explicitly enable this cop in our Rubocop configurations so if a developer wants to mark content as safe, they will need to explicitly disable the cop. With integration testing being a key level of the testing pyramid, we needed to find a way to test how features in our app interacted without the overhead involved with setting up UI tests. Read our blog post to find out more. In general, our CI platform categorizes projects into applications and libraries and divides those up further by language runtime. We still want to maximize our objective function V. However, with the introduction of the drift terms, we want every dollar allocated toward a single fund to incur a penalty if it moves the target balance for that funds asset class below or above its target amount. As shown above, weve asserted that the sum of the balances in funds including U.S. total market stocks (in this case, only VTI), plus some net drift amount in that asset class, must be equal to the target balance of that asset class in the portfolio (which in this case, is 50% of Joes total holdings). We focus on writing expressive, fast, and reliable solitary unit tests, some sociable integrated tests of related units, and some "end-to-end-ish" tests. Weve also covered how our custom cops can help developers avoid antipatterns, resulting in safer and easier to read code. 23 Betterment Software Engineer interview questions and 17 interview reviews. 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. These are not leetcode problems, these are asking you to implement functionality using ruby on rails. Certain snappy user experience elements dont work as well without JavaScript. Those bootcamps changed all of our lives! When an input or an assumption changes, it should be as easy as re-running the whole thing. This is where SLOs come in. But were getting into pretty uncharted territory here, and, as always, your mileage may vary! This would be accomplished through the use of dashboards displayed on TV screens inside the office. This gives us the confidence that all our code is configured properly, all our dependencies are provided, our navigation works, and the user can tap on whatever and see what they'd expect to see. 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. After months of planning across all teams at the company, it was time for our engineering team to implement new and responsive designs across all user experiences. Then we do the same for the deposit API call. And for our server, we need to add a route, a controller, a model, and a jbuilder to render that model as JSON. Suffice it to say, crypto will not be the focus of this post. What is Secrets Management? 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. 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. In most cases, a user transaction will eventually be the parent of several trade objects. Being surrounded by a bunch of smart, helpful people has also been super amazing and helped me grow as an engineer. For a problem space as large as ours, we cant fulfill that promise with a singletwo pizza team. Feb 2019 - Present4 years 2 months. Onboarding new hires familiar with the Rails framework will be faster, and those who arent familiar can find great external (and internal) resources to learn it. We decided to allow candidates the choice of using a whiteboard if they wished, but it would no longer be the default method for presenting ones skills. The gem includes a tiny Julia project with the API library as its only dependency. 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? We use SitePrism to abstract away bespoke page interactions and CSS selectors. The take home and both onsite interview questions were not arbitrary but very practical and relevant to what I'd actually be working on. Those interviewers dont fill out a scorecard, and our hiring managers are forbidden from discussing candidates with them. The takeaway The biggest lesson to learn from this experience is that, as an engineer, you should not be afraid to take a functional approach when it makes sense. I interviewed at Betterment (Columbia, MD) in May 2022. 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. When the app starts up, the decrypted secrets will be available as environment variables only to the process running the application instead of being available system wide. Uncertainty like this makes it hard to build new and awesome features into a product. To implement this pattern, we use AmazonS3as a persistent storage tier. Well, when building web applications, we (as web application developers) strive to build pages that respond quickly and reliably to web requests. While we may implement a hot-standby backup in the future, we simply accept it as a known risk and set our monitoring system to notify a team member of any deviances. Software engineering interviews, like other technical interviews, require plenty of preparation. Please query for the associated record in a way that enforces authorization (e.g. We built a tool (Coach) to make the way that we build and test code conventional across all of our of apps, regardless of language, application owner, or business unit. Sometimes its not in our best interest to be too focused on performance, and we can instead use up our error budget by rolling out some new A/B test, or upgrading a library weve been putting off for a while, or testing out a new language in a user-facing component that we might not otherwise have had the chance to explore. Benefits of measuring the right things, and staying on target The goal of an SLO based approach to engineering is to provide data points with which to have a reasonable conversation about priorities (a point that Alex Hidalgo drives home in his book Implementing Service Level Objectives). 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. Below is an example system spec. We dont expect these principles to appeal to everybody. To facilitate versioning and sharing of our Julia packages internally (e.g. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. Magic ) is only a few lines of code. As of July 2016, all full-stack, mobile, and site-reliability engineering roles have adopted this new approach. Use SQLite database to be efficient The best way to store the user transaction objects was to use JSON, a human-readable representation of Java objects. 16.0availableacrossallstores. It ensures that new features can be shipped more quickly, it allows new services to adopt our standardized CI strategy with ease, and it lets us recover faster in the face of disastera hurricane causing a power outage at one of our data centers. 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. These restrictions require us to allow for some portfolio driftsome deviation from the target allocation. CI/CD: Shortening the Feedback Loop As we improve and scale our CD platform, shortening the feedback loop with notifications was a small, effective, and important piece. We wrote tests around the methods in question. Unlike our original IRA calculator, RetireGuide needed to follow the core product principles of the Betterment experience: efficiency, real-time feedback, and delight. We turned toAirflowbecause it has emerged as a full-featured workflow management framework better suited to orchestrate frequent tasks throughout the day. Finally, flutter_driver is not built to run a suite of tests or to run easily in CI. If you don't know Ruby + rails, don't bother since it's the only language you're allowed to work with. Enter, end-to-end-ish tests (patent pending ). Well-tested code stored in version control that could easily be changed and developed. Whats next? Interested in engineering at Betterment? If the code is not on any active or planned future development paths and has been working for years, it probably isn't worth it. Were building the future of investing. Really good! Getting in the habit of asking these questions during code review should lead to more frequent conversations about security and data access. 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. From a design standpoint, executing a preferred name feature was pretty straightforwardwe needed to provide a user with a way to share their preferred name with us, and then start using it. Isolating New Code with ActionPack Variants ActionPack variantsprovide an elegant solution to rolling out significant front end changes. 2 Betterment Lead Software Engineer interview questions and 2 interview reviews. These interviews are in Ruby on Rails - know ruby on rails beforehand, since it is difficult to read / implement on the spot. When were communicating with external services, we have less control, but HTTP is the protocol of the web and REST has been around since 2000the dawn of modern web applications so the majority of integrations we build will use them. The Nitty Gritty Details In order to describe how our integration tests work, let's start by describing an example app that we may want to test. With my start-up survival kit in tow, it was time to move on from my job as a back-office engineer. The process took 7 weeks. On Fishbowl, you can share insights and advice anonymously with Betterment employees and get real answers from people on the inside. But once we looked under the surface, #firstname was sprinkled nearly everywhere in our codebase. Were using AmazonsDatabase Migration Service(DMS) to replace our Luigi-implemented replication solution and re-building all other Luigi workflows in Airflow. 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. New York City: $135,000 - $155,000. In our app we use dio and not dart:io's built-in HTTP client mostly due to preference and slight feature set differences. These are our decision variablesvariables that were trying to solve for. Betterment engineers (l-r): Arielle Sullivan, J.P. Patrizio, Harris Effron, and Paddy Estridge We recently changed the way we organize our major business objects. The technical interviews stood out from other on-site experiences because the problems felt "real world" - they were based on actual challenges Betterment's team has had to solve. Read more about working at Citrus Informatics. It leaves the variable name in plain-text while only encrypting the secret value itself and supports YAML, JSON, or binary format.
Building those small, tight-knit groups promotes relationships that can help the company over time. 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. You can also watch myRails at Scale talkto learn why we developed them and how we maintain them. Now that we have our objective function and constraints set up, we just need to solve these equations. Under the covers, request specs are just a thin wrapper around Rails integration tests. For example, consider a request spec for our Documents::AttachmentsController: These test cases are an inexpensive way to prove to yourself and your reviewers that youve considered the authorization context of your controller action and accounted for it properly. I applied through a recruiter. 3. chicken:3.000lbs(3.0instock) carrots:0.632lbs(2.0instock) thyme:0.000lbs(6.0instock) onions:0.000lbs(4.0instock) noodles:5.000lbs(9.0instock) garlic:0.000lbs(0.0instock) parsley:0.000lbs(1.0instock) 16.000lbsofchicken. This is why Betterment has a rule requiring UUIDs for all new tables. Julia ticks the box for this requirement as well by using ajust-in-time compilerthat accommodates both interactive and non-interactive workflows well. Also, I didn't think I would ever say this, but the recruiter I worked with throughout the process was truly amazing. You can also register to attend our Women Who Code meetups, and join engineers from all over New York as we grow, solve, and connect with one another. There was the feature work stream which involved: Storing the users new name information. Variable server response times do not provide an optimal user experience, especially when performing personalized financial projections. Any features youd like to see added? In order to help these engineers, we provided guidelines around where it was necessary to use a legal first name, but in general we pushed to use a customers preferred first name wherever possible. Meanwhile, if our queue existed in a separate datastore, our enqueues will be completely unaware of the transaction, and wed run the risk of enqueuing a job that acts on data that was never committed, or (even worse) wed fail to enqueue a job even when the rest of the transactional data was committed. Continuous IntegrationOur Principles For years, we usedJenkins, an open-source tool for automation, and a mess of scripts to provide CI/CD to our engineers. Decisions, decisions While researching our options, we happened upon a tool calledsops. We recently re-optimized our portfolio to include more complex asset allocations and risk models (and it will soon be available). 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. Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. Why Background Jobs? I work on a real-time customer data platform called the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP .