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betterment software engineer interview
Notifications When we merge our SLO templates into this repository, Coach will manage creating SLO resources in Datadog and accompanying SLO alerts (that ping slack channels of our choice) if and when our SLOs violate their target goals. Collecting the SLIs and Creating the SLOs The SRE team has a web-app and CLI called coach that we use to manage continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), among other things. There is no need to test corner cases or very specific business logic in system specs (those assertions belong in model specs). If you don't know Ruby + rails, don't bother since it's the only language you're allowed to work with. In short its a sloppy feature spec. 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. - Final interview, stay on one project, swap groups of different interviewers. Not even knowing we didn't do it very bad. For this we used a modified version of Very Good Venture's robot testing pattern that would allow us to reuse screen interactions across multiple tests while also making our tests very readable from even a non-engineering perspective. Why dont we use Feature Specs? This means that these usages ofrawandhtml_safeshould still be violations. Betterment sits at the intersection of finance and technologytwo industries with large, historical diversity gaps, including women and underrepresented populations. The CLI handles notifications, artifact generation, and deployment triggers. Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. 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. As a fellow software engineer, I can personally attest to experiencing this phenomenon in tech, but Ive also heard from friends and colleagues that it can be present in non-technical backgrounds, as well. When I started at Betterment (the company) five years ago, Betterment (the platform) was a monolithic Java application. 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. Uncertainty like this makes it hard to build new and awesome features into a product. Thirdly, we don't want to have shared code across service boundaries. CPU optimized) to further reduce costs. Though our contract with projects of different types is standardized, we permit some level of customization. We needed more easily accessible business measures with sufficient context by which we and our colleagues could roll up or slice and dice our data. 0<=a1<=5 0<=a2<=1 0<=a3<=3 0<=a4<=6 0<=d7<=1 That expresses all of the constraints and bounds to our problem and the optimizer works to maximize or minimize the objective function subject to those bounds and constraints. Implementing a local fallback for remote hooks made our code much more testable and easier to work with locally, while still allowing us to run with Airflow-maintained functionality in production. The minimize function takes this in as a list of tuples where the indices line up with x. There are so many links in the development chain, and what I have learned in school barely covers half of a link. So, we fixedit Rather than continue to use our custom cops, we decided to give back to the community and fix the issues we had found with the Rails/OutputSafety cop. Engineering the Trading Platform: Inside Betterments Portfolio Optimization To complete the portfolio optimization, Betterment engineers needed enhance the code in our existing trading platform. We sent out questionnaires in advance but collected answers through face-to-face dialogue. Striving for Simplicity At Betterment, we aim to build products that help our customers reach their financial goals. Both libraries are great and each is designed for a specific challenge, check both of them out and decide which one works for your needs. The links to the various services we use are in the same order as our new failure messages, but the link to CircleCI only goes to the workflow that shows the graph of all the tests and jobs that ran. The resulting analytical master file was still large, but small enough to fit on a regular MacBook Pro. So the string option was appealing to us, but that workflow didnt have the best editing experience as it required multiple steps in order to encrypt a value, insert it into the correct file, and then export it into the environment like the12-factor appmethodology tells us we should. With the gem installed, we can use the generator rails g webvalve:install to bootstrap a default config file where we can register our fakes. In Luigi, we knew when the data was pulled and only then would we trigger a task. Citrus Informatics Engineering - Software & QA Department Reviews Unfortunately, its not. If we were to inject user-provided content onto a page without escaping it, wed be vulnerable to executing malicious code in the users browser, allowing an attacker full control over a customers session.This resourceis helpful to learn more about XSS. if unit tests ran on 20 containers and 18 of them saw failures, only notify once) Only notifyonceabout all the green things Give as muchcontextas possible without being overwhelming: beconcisebutclear Next well explore the changes we made in content. We chose to fake the http client since it is the very edge of our network layer. Thinking big, we decided to dub ourselves Team Polaris after the sky's brightest star. Fidel Severino: While working, I would take any available time for courses on websites like Codecademy and Team Treehouse. NSFaceIDUsageDescription The other difference with Face ID is the newNSFaceIDUsageDescriptionprivacy string that should be included in the applicationsInfo.plistfile. This part will come off as if I'm full of myself, but my tech skills are fine. A few days into my internship, I sat through a meeting about traditional and Roth IRAs wondering, what does IRA stand for? Also, the flutter_driver API worked differently than the screen testing API and was generally more difficult to use. The complexity partly arose from the fact that we needed to duplicate business logic from the backend and the frontend. Company Executive1:1 on your background and the company. 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. For this reason, we chose to wrapLABiometryTypebehind our ownBiometryTypeenum. Glassdoor users rated their interview experience at Betterment as 47.0% positive with a difficulty rating score of 2.82 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty). It began with some verbal Q&A about how things like databases and the internet work, along with certain tradeoffs. It can also dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to solve a problem. All coding exercises were real world examples, no leetcode or theoretical problem solving questions. 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 applied online. Was the error budget consumed by real failures? For our Ruby on Rails apps, that looks like this: sopsorific run 'bundle exec rails c' What did we learn? 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. 4. So what does the fake look like? I applied online. We use a multi-threaded web server for our production application, and so when we make a call into the Julia shared library, we push that call onto a queue where it gets picked up and performed by a single executor thread which then communicates the result back to the calling thread using apromiseobject. Then there was a second round interview with another software engineer, a technical project manager and the director of engineering. We have a strong preference to use a single integration pattern for both internal and external service integrations; this reduces cognitive overhead for devs. My first task involved DTC participants, CUSIPs, and ACATSall terms that Id never heard before. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY). We identified two viable alternatives: Build a thin web service that will accept HTTP requests, call the underlying Julia functions, and then return a HTTP response. Our next SHARE Series event features CBS News Business Analyst and CFP professional Jill Schlesinger, as we celebrate her new book, The Dumb Things Smart People Do with Their Money: Thirteen Ways to Right Your Financial Wrongs. Interview was 30 mins. Total of 6 interviews (phone and in person) Can we talk about why you decided to become an Engineer? It also gave me a good view on what's day to day work is like. Youll notice the familiar termsmeasuring the expected value of holding each fund in each account, but also youll notice variables of the form Precisely, this variable represents the balance of fund F in account A. There needs to be a way to idempotently generate the CircleCI configuration (.circleci/config.yml) for all the projects in a repo at once. 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. New York City: $135,000 - $155,000. 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. Also, I didn't think I would ever say this, but the recruiter I worked with throughout the process was truly amazing. We wanted that same level of flexibility in changing our mathematical model. 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. Take a minute and review this controller - what jumps out to you? And, boy howdy, are there plenty of available frameworks for doing this kind of thing! Our CLI and the accompanying conventions make that possible. We're engineering Betterment to become a top-notch fintech company. And then were back to square one. To facilitate versioning and sharing of our Julia packages internally (e.g. Keep these in mind when writing or reviewing application code that an authenticated user will utilize and remember that authorization should be clear and obvious. To fulfill that promise, we need to deliver the best product and tools available and then improve them indefinitely, which, when you think about it, sounds incredibly ambitious or even foolhardy. Step 1: Recruiter call and ByteBoard OA. The first round of "in person" interviews. This way, if we cant achieve perfect allocation, we have a buffer that we can fillalbeit at a penalty. Variable server response times do not provide an optimal user experience, especially when performing personalized financial projections. 2. But a scaled engineering org presents other challenges that could just as easily put the goal out of reach. sopsorific runis another custom command we built to make our usage of sops seamless. 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. To be sure, we don't take changing our system lightly. I came away from the in-person meetings with a strong sense that this would be both a great learning opportunity and an excellent group of people to work with. 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. 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. 3. I have always been interested in technology. Every component is on brand and consistent with every other app, feels polished, high quality and requires lower effort to implement. I was one of those kids who broke their toys in order to find out how they worked. 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. provided they know or can guess its ID - not great! Here's how we turned a request for more inclusion into a feature all Betterment customers can benefit from. Secrets also define how your application behaves. Building for Better: Gender Inclusion at Betterment Betterment sits at the intersection of two industries with large, historical gender gaps. Model specs have a live database connection, but we like to think of our model specs as unit tests. Currently, Julia powers all the projections shown inside our app, as well as a lot of the advice we provide to our customers. When we set up a new plugin and we wrap it in a class that we inject into our app. Analysis, Model Building, Learning Youll probably only present one or two of the scores of models and variants you build and test. Menu . Im not talking about spoken languages. The process took 3 weeks. The reply completion closure ofevaluatePolicy(_:localizedReason:reply:) This made testing from the iOS Simulator a viable option for gaining a reasonable degree of certainty that our application would behave as expected when running on a device, thus allowing us to prepare a build in advance of having a device to test on. Secondly, its missing environment-specific behavior, which in this case, translates into the ability to toggle the library on and off and separately toggle the connection to specific collaborator services on and off. Coding challenge and Sys design. In doing all of these things, weve reduced bottlenecks for developers so they can focus more on shipping features and less on managing secrets. What is an SLO? 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. Secured rank among top 15 in letsgrowmore summer of code, won first place in Diversion 2022, among top 3 mentors in . Lets say it is. Pact's docs encourage these human conversations, but as a tool it doesn't require them. 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. Here's how we did it. Be the first to find this interview helpful, If you had $10k how would you sell yourself for the role. Its definitely the case that a team might not be at the level of operational maturity where defining product or user-specific service level objectives is in the cards. Do's and Don'ts for Software Engineer Job Interview - DZone We came up with a few rules to design this part of the system: Let the author knowas soon as possiblewhen something is red but dont overdo it for redundant failures within the same job (e.g. It's clever and great. The Problem Proportional allocation comes up often throughout our codebase, but its easiest to explain using a fictional example: Suppose your paychecks are $1000 each, and you always allocate them to your different savings accounts as follows: College savings fund: $310 Buy a car fund: $350 Buy a house fund: $200 Safety net: $140 Now suppose youre an awesome employee and received a bonus of $1234.56. Theyd attended a number of networking and connection events, and the events never felt quite right. Here's what our API looks like and how we use it to set up a fake HTTP client for our tests. Sr. Software Engineer - Backend (Remote) - Betterment | Built In It's similar to libraries for other platforms that allow you to define fake responses for HTTP requests using a nice API and then inject those fake responses into your HTTP client. To answer that question, Ill leave you with one last takeaway. Fortunately, it was a fun experience and it really took very little time! Linear programs try to optimize the value of an objective function. There are also feasibility limits. Heres what an example Ruby appscoach.ymllooks like: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/2f966ab69ba1c7895ce312aec511aa6b The CLI will refer back to a projectscoach.ymlto decide what kind of CircleCI DSL needs to be written to the.circleci/config.ymlfile to wire up the right jobs to run at the right time. 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. For his recipe he needs a ratio of: 40% chicken 12% carrots 8% thyme 15% onions 15% noodles 5% garlic 5% parsley All of the stores around him only keep limited amounts in stock. They test the beginning to end workflow of a particular feature, verifying that the different components of an application interact with each other as intended. That tells WebValve what requests to intercept and route to this fake. Wanting to save more for his retirement, he decided to open up a Betterment taxable account, which he funded with an additional $11,000. Its only been about three decades since companies started using any kind of computer-assisted data analysis. As an engineer, I not only love building products from the ground up, but Im passionate about bringing awareness to diversity in tech, an important topic that has soared to the forefront of social justice issues. No trick questions. 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. We talked about my career and what I was looking for. We want them to be able to work without an internet connection, and if we do want to integrate with a real service in local development, we should be able to do thatmeaning we should be able to test and integrate locally at will, without having to rely on cumbersome, extra-connected services (think Docker, Kubernetes; anything that pairs cloud features with the local environment.) When we make improvements to one project types base configuration, we can flip a switch and turn it on foreveryone in the org at once. Now assume that the $50,000 in each account is invested into a portfolio of 70% stocks and 30% bonds. NDA signed. Well, it was one part versatility of software engineering, one part courage to work in an industry I knew nothing about, and a dash of eagerness to learn as much as I could. Other Improvements We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. This keeps the tests feeling familiar to normal screen tests since the exposed interface is very similar to how widget tests are written. After that there was a first round interviews with 2 software engineers and 1 manager totaling about 2.5 hours. First round with Hiring Manager and rejected. It failed for a specific GitHub branch(what-to-say-when-things-fail-branch),ina specific repo(Betterment/coach),for a specific PR(#430),for aspecific job in the test suite (coach_clilint (Gemfile)). The data is too large, the analyses are too complex, and mistakes are too dangerous to trust to our dear old friend the spreadsheet. Furthermore, this combination of at-least-once execution and idempotency can then be used in a distributed systems context, to ensure the eventual consistency of changes across multiple apps and databases. For example, a task computing all of a prior days activity executed at midnight would be inaccurate if Redshift were missing data from DMS at midnight due to lag. In this example, we are trying to maximize the number of pounds of ingredients he can buy because that will result in the most soup. Its as if we optimized the engine for a car, and now we needed to test it on the race track with different weather conditions, tires, and drivers. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2023. Feb 2019 - May 20212 years 4 months. Of course, job resolution doesnt necessarily mean success. 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. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? And we think we made it a little easier for them (and us) to do just that. You got one notification message when everything succeeded and you still do. Im going to walk you through how we got there. Please query for the associated record in a way that enforces authorization (e.g. When a secret is added to production, we have a check that makes sure that same secret is also added to all other ecosystems so that they continue to function properly. The process took 2 months. the shared preferences plugin can use a single integration test to provide certainty that it works as intended. Dell question - Implement a distributed lock for large-scale cluster. As an avid saver, Joe quickly reached his annual Roth IRA contribution limit of $5,500. The content on this page is reflective of a specific point in time (as of the publication date). In practice, that might look something like this: Resulting in a function for which the fact that the underlying implementation is in Julia has been completely abstracted away: Challenges & Pitfalls Debugging an FFI integration can be challenging; any misconfiguration is likely to result in the dreadedsegmentation faultthe cause of which can be difficult to hunt down. Focusing on What Matters: Using SLOs to Pursue User Happiness Proper reliability is the greatest operational requirement for any service. We came up with ACES: Automated, Consistent, Efficient, and Self-serviced as the motifs by which we could create a measurable feedback loop. are kept secure at every stage of the software development lifecycle. 12.00% 3.200lbsofthyme. I applied online. Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. You never know when youll want to circle back. 2 Technical interviews, followed by an AMA style lunch and then behavioral interviews for the rest of the day. Lets assume that a User has many Attachments that can be attached to a Document they own. So, how do we choose where to spend our time? However, in keeping with the company mission to provide smarter investing, it was clear that re-engineering our code was essential to creating a better product. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. 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. Explore. To learn more about engineering at Betterment, visit the engineering page on the Betterment Resource Center. Interviewers were professional throughout. 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. Our hiring managers now report that they have a much clearer understanding of what each candidate brings to the table. The structure of a Web app is a lot more complex than what the user sees on the page. The flag takes a seed that can be one of two things, either a 32 bit unsigned integer or the word random. The on-site interview consisted of three parts: 2 technical interviews, lunch with a "buddy", and then several non-technical interviews with product and engineering leadership. Limit disruption while we build To limit disruption to our colleagues while delivering incremental improvements, we implemented a clever and completely practical transition plan within MySQLs native feature set. To capture that idea, we introduced a concept we call security zones into sopsorific. The next thing we needed to decide was what user experiences we actually wanted to test with our integration tests. 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). Asked for feedback after the rejection and didn't get any. The simplest questions tend to be the hardest to answer. The optimization package were using in this example, pythons scipy.optimize, provides a very expressive interface for specifying all of those bounds and constraints. Because integration tests are more expensive to write and maintain than screen tests, we wanted to make sure the flows we were testing were the most impactful. We not only had unit tests such as the one above to test simple scenarios where a human could calculate the outcome, but we also ran the optimizer in a simulated production-like environment, through hundreds of thousands of scenarios that closely resembled real ones. The process took 3 weeks. 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. All the info I provided is given to you at the time of the interview. Any error budget we set should account for our fiduciary responsibilities, and should guarantee that we do not cause an irresponsible impact to our customers. This is where SLOs come in. Throughout this journey, we learned many things along the way. It does make you feel vulnerable, but it keeps you moving forward. We ran the Monte Carlo simulations over two weekends. All code is peer reviewed and does not go to production if there is not adequate test coverage or if the code is not up to design standards. 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. If you are new to one or both of these environments, it can be daunting to sort through all of the tools and figure out what does what. We 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 can maintain the aggregate 70/30 asset allocation, but use the available balances of $50,000 each, to rearrange the securities in such a way that places the most tax-efficient holdings into a taxable account, and the most tax-inefficient ones into IRAs. Similarly, the sum of the balances of every fund in his Roth IRA must remain at $5,500. If you made a mistake, how do you handle that situation? Combined together we call this aproject_type. I made the jump to start becoming an engineer. An example Lets say at the last minute, the Soup Nazi is out to make the biggest batch of soup he possibly can. From a high level view I essentially split this large engineering lift into two different streams of work. With all these decisions made, we arrived at a well-defined integration testing framework that isolated our concerns and fulfilled our testing requirements. To avoid time-consuming manual processes, and the human error typical of that approach, analytics has become a programming discipline.
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