Were always iterating on our solutions, so if youre interested in expanding on or solving these types of problems with us, check out ourcareer page! 30 min Q & A with head of recruiting - you ask questions, recruiter asks questions For example, if our system sold something at a short-term capital gain in Joes taxable account, or bought a security in his Roth IRA that was sold at a loss in the last 30 daystriggering the wash-sale rule, we would be negatively impacting his after-tax return. While this will certainly work for this particular example, enforcing that the portfolio allocation is exactly on target when determining optimality turns out to be too restrictive. You learned how to be talented, dynamic engineers and we reap the benefit. If we attempted to deploy this code, RuboCop would fail the build, preventing the code from going out while letting reviewers know exactly why. But I really liked how "organic" these problems were since I got a sense of the actual challenges I would be facing as well as the tools and practices used by the team. I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. Overall, I got the impression their interview process is very focused on cultural fit and enthusiasm for the product more than anything else. Finally, we will share some tactics for enabling data scientists to be more collaborative and presentational with their R or Python visualizations. He calls around to all the stores just to see what the have in stock and puts together each stores inventory: Ingredients in stock (lbs) Elaines Georges Jerrys Newmans Chicken 5 6 2 3 Carrots 1 8 5 2 Thyme 3 19 16 6 Onions 6 12 10 4 Noodles 5 0 3 9 Garlic 2 1 1 0 Parsley 3 6 2 1 Also, the quality of the bags at all of the stores vary, limiting the total number pounds of food the Soup Nazi can carry back. Deadnaming is when, intentionally or not, you refer to a trans person by the name they used before transitioning. Heres how we did it. It can also dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to solve a problem. We decided to create that large file by ostensibly concatenating smaller components together. Fortunately, we were able to get rid of most of the legacy code encountered during the portfolio optimization project using this method. The Flutter integration testing landscape At the very beginning of our transition to flutter, we started trying to write integration tests for our features using flutters solution at the time: flutter_driver. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Be the first to find this interview helpful. Soon enough, I had not only expanded my knowledge of engineering best practices, but I learned about dividends, tax loss harvesting, and IRAs (it stands for individual retirement account, in case you were wondering). Recently, however, weve invested significant resources in modernizing this research pipeline by converting our codebase from R to Julia and were now able to ship updates to our quantitative models quicker, and with less risk of errors being introduced in translation. This general propertythe ability to enqueue jobs safely and ensure their eventual resolutionis the core feature that we have optimized for. A software engineer needs to be multilingual. There was no hint of arrogance or a lack of candor from anyone. By default, sopsorific wants to be configured with a production (sensitive zone) secrets file and a default (non-sensitive zone) secrets file. 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. Heres an example of the basic directory structure: .sops.yaml app/ |_ deployment_secrets/ |_ sensitive/ |_ production.yml |_ nonsensitive/ |_ default.yml |_ devin_test.yml The security zone concept allows a more granular access control policy as we can federate decrypt permissions on a per application and per security zone basis by granting or revoking access to KMS keys with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles. These are powered by instrumentation and continuous monitoring features that we have added directly to the delayed gem itself. What is legacy code? We needed a team responsible for collecting, curating and presenting the dataand our data had to be trustworthy for objective metric-level reporting to the organization. Unlike our original IRA calculator, RetireGuide needed to follow the core product principles of the Betterment experience: efficiency, real-time feedback, and delight. Getting in the habit of asking these questions during code review should lead to more frequent conversations about security and data access. What could happen if we dont escapecontent? I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jun 2019. Building out the user interface. We provide a class that exposes the developer-friendly configuration API for fake responses, and we implement the HttpClientAdapter interface provided by dio. Similarly, even our authorized endpoints never allow one user to peer into another users object graph. Take a look at Blazer. To add a new set of constraints, engineers simply provide an implementation of a TradingConstraintGenerator. . We valued the ability to encrypt just the secret values themselves and leave the variable name in plain-text. It is bootstrapped (sampled in chunks) to help generate potential futures. Then there are outliers Yet sometimes even the best practices still didnt apply to a piece of legacy code. Optimal portfolio management requires managing a portfolio in real-time, including taxes, rebalancing, risk, and circumstantial variables like cashflows. The first was our flutter/native boundary. Or they can define some SLOs around types of on-call tasks that their team tackles each week. We wrote tests around the methods in question. We like to evaluate how well a candidate explains the design decisions and progress from one interviewer to the next. Contributing toCI Before, if you wanted to add an additional linter or CI tool to our pipeline, it would require adding a few lines of untested bash code to an existing Jenkins job, or adding a new job to a precarious graph of jobs, and crossing your fingers that it would just work. The addition couldnt be tested and it was often only available to one project or one repository at a time. Tax efficiency is a key consideration of Betterments portfolio management philosophy. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? In our experience, it has always taken longer than expected. Tell me about yourself Describe a process you fixed. Normally wed consider opting out of security analysis to be an unsafe thing to do, but we actually like the way RuboCop handles this because it can help reduce some code review effort; the first solution eliminates the vulnerable-looking pattern (even if it wasnt a vulnerability to begin with) while the second one signals to reviewers that they should confirm this code is actually safe (making it easy to pinpoint areas of focus). Given these reasons, Julia is the perfect language to serve as a solution to the two-language problem. In order to build this, we needed to do two overhauls: 1) Build a new CI pipeline and 2) Build a new CD pipeline. We followed up shortly after with apull requestto patch the second issuechange the behavior of the cop to disallow usages ofsafe_concat. 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. What all of these tasks had in common (aside from being, well, really important to our business) is that they were executed via a database-backed job-execution framework called Delayed, a newly-open-sourced library that were excited to announce right now, as part of this blog post! Fortunately, it was a fun experience and it really took very little time! The beginning of our Flutter testing journey Up until early 2020, our mobile app was entirely native with separate android and iOS codebases. It also really felt like the company was working in good faith the entire process and I definitely took notice. Here's how they did it. But, if Elaine was set up a certain way, we wanted to go back to Jerry and adjust the decisions we made for him. New York City: $190,000 - $205,000. Find contacts: direct phone number, email address, work experience. My experience this summer has been invaluable, and I will be returning to school with a brand new view on software development and what a career in this awesome field will be like. Their office is ok-ish. By automating detection of these low hanging fruit vulnerabilities, we can free up engineering effort during security reviews and focus on more interesting and complex issues. What is Secrets Management? 2. Its no small feat, but we do it by empowering our teams to set goals, own projects, advocate for features, and challenge the status quo of both our industry and our way of thinking. I didn't connect too well with one of the managers in the final round and saw the rejection coming. It was built out over the past few years, with many different paradigms and patterns. As a result, in addition to learning how well a candidate can write code, we learn how well they collaborate. Those principles can form chains of reasoning that allow us to run fearlessly, in parallel, and arrive at coherent solutions better than the sum of their parts. Consider these principles, along with our current and future open source work, part of our contribution to that conversation. This is extremely convenient, to say the least, since most jobs are enqueued as part of operations that persist other changes to our database, and we can in turn rely on the all-or-nothing nature of transactions to ensure that neither the job nor the data mutation is persisted without the other. After flipping the feature flag and establishing rebrand as the permanent variant context, all that remained was to destroy the legacy files that were no longer being rendered and remove the variant name from the file extension of the new primary view template. This made the problem provably solvable and quick to computeon the order of milliseconds per customer. How much money do you put in each account? In Luigi, we knew when the data was pulled and only then would we trigger a task. For instance, at Betterment, we faced the challenge of allocating a sum of money proportionally across multiple buckets. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? Similarly, were also asserting that the sum of the balances of VWOB across Joes accounts must be equal to the remaining half of his total balance. With a goal of 99.9%, we have 40 minutes and 19 seconds of downtime available to us every 28 days. Other Testing Recommendations Consider shared examples for last-mile regression coverage and repeated patterns. We were able to achieve a polished and consistent visual identity under a tight deadline which was pretty great, but when we had our project retrospective, we realized there was a pain point that still loomed over us. But I soon realized it was just the opposite: Knowing less about finance motivated me to learnquickly. There needs to be a way to set up a new project. 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. Instead, we opted to model our problem as a linear program. This manual testing was tedious and time consuming for engineers, whose time is expensive. Asking for someones name is simple, but full of assumptions. 2) Small take home problem, mostly about correctly reading requirements and providing an implementation. Seemed mostly focused on identifying your work style. And we need the best to do that. When requested through the Local Authentication framework, the biometry evaluation either succeeds or fails separate from any given state of an application. For example, the<%==interpolation token renders content as is andraw,htmlsafe, andsafe_concatsimply return aSafeBuffercontaining the original content as is, which poses a security risk. Then, we look at the user API callwe define a new route for user, in FakeTrading. Ask Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two Harvard economists who published an influential paper on sovereign debt and economic growth, only to find out that the results rested in part on the accidental omission of five cells from an average. @Sla @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME) @Target(ElementType.METHOD) public @interface Sla { @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) long amount() default 25_000; @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) ChronoUnit unit() default ChronoUnit.MILLIS; @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) String service() default "custody-web"; @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) String slackChannelName() default "java-team-alerts"; @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) boolean shouldPage() default false; @AliasFor(annotation = Sla.class) String owner() default "java-team"; } Then usage is just as simple as adding the annotation to the controller: @WebController("/api/stuff/v1/service_we_care_about") public class ServiceWeCareAboutController { @PostMapping("/search") @CustodySla(amount = 500) public SearchResponse search(@RequestBody @Valid SearchRequest request) {} } At deploy time, these annotations are scanned and converted into monitors along with the config-driven definitions, just like our Ruby implementation. I definitely think that even though cash is going nowhere fast, fewer and fewer people will ever need to make a trip to the bank again, and everything will be on our devices. Centralizing architectural decision-making would kill ownership and autonomy, and ensure your best people leave or never join in the first place. Since one of the draws of using Julia in the first place is the performance of the code, we make sure to benchmark our code during every pull request for potential performance regressions using theBenchmarkTools.jlpackage. Namely, the guarantee of at-least-once execution. 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. We're building an investing platform that's one of the first of its kind. I was thrilled. Step 1: Recruiter call and ByteBoard OA. Finding a Middle Ground Between Screen and UI Testing in Flutter We outline the struggles we had testing our flutter app, our approaches to those challenges, and the solutions we arrived at to solve those problems. This simple question from our trans customers Can you quit deadnaming me? was a sign that our original understanding of our customers' names was not quite right, and we were lacking knowledge around how names are commonly used. And therein lies the rub, because whether or not our job queue is colocated with our application data will greatly inform the way that we write any job-adjacent code. This summer, I had the privilege of participating in a software engineering internship with Betterment. It is your responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, timeliness and completeness of any information available on a linked website. Some javascript questions about scoping and how to build an app. Therefore, the cop should hold the same opinions aboutsafe_concatas it does about the other two methods. This rule is applicable for all controller actions and is a critical component of our security story. 2 Betterment Lead Software Engineer interview questions and 2 interview reviews. I interviewed at Betterment (Columbia, MD) in May 2022. 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. We cant take negative ingredients from the store, so the lower bound it always 0. These were some of the questions we asked ourselves during this part of the design phase. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. 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. High Availability inAirflow While Airflow doesnt claim to be highly available out of the box, we built an infrastructure to get as close as possible. Beautiful, practical design. You might guess that you can express it as follows: The above statements assert that the sum of the balances of VTI across Joes accounts must be equal to half of his total balance. At Betterment, were working on our own set of initiatives to drive the conversation. We were also required to rename several core concepts, and make some big changes to the way we display data to our customers. 2 hr ByteBoard interview - 40 min design and algorithms (know your standard data structures and algorithms), 70 mins implementing some methods Failed after the onsite interview because apparently my tech skills weren't "up to par." These are not leetcode problems, these are asking you to implement functionality using ruby on rails. Store results in central location: We used another Amazon Cloud service called S3 to store the results of each simulation. Explaining how we use sopsorific is best done by exploring how our secrets management workflow plays out for each stage of the software development lifecycle. What our SRE Team Needed Our design and UX was informed by what our engineers using our platform needed, but Coach was built based on our needs. We usedRails partialsin an effort to keep the code DRY (Dont Repeat Yourself) while sharing the same chunks of code and that got us pretty far, but it had its limitations. Build extra time into project estimates Legacy code can also be tricky when it comes to project estimates. Failure to do so could mean anything from creating a minor inconvenience to blocking trades from executing. Designing an Off Ramp Just as we are committed to rolling out large changes in small portions, we are careful to avoid huge changesets on the other side of a release. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. When pursuing this ourselves, we found it valuable to evaluate our testing strategy deficits, identify clear-cut boundaries around what code we wanted to test, and establish standards around what flows through the app should be tested. Betterment is an engineering-driven company that has developed the most trusted online financial advisor based on the principles of optimization and efficiency. No algorithmic brain teasers. Given the formulaic patterns of these bugs, we decided static analysis would be a worthwhile endeavor. And the Betterment engineering team is avoiding the dreaded productivity and happiness suck that happens when working on systems with too much legacy code. The GSON/JSON/SQLite testing framework helped the trading team maintain laser focus on their task, as they worked under the hood. We wanted to maintain the same format as the new failure messages for consistency and ease of reading. So, the second major difference is that we inject a fake HTTP configuration into our network stack so that we can run nearly all of our code for real but cut out the other unreliable and costly dependency. We like to extract standard assertions such as ones relating to authentication into shared examples. Were excited to see how the model of projects and project types that we built for CI will evolve to help us templatize ourKubernetesdeployments. And why that's important. 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). But we do believe strongly that theres more to agree about than our industry has been able to establish so far. Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. Using our new platform to build and test code would allow our engineers to receive automated feedback sooner so they could iterate faster. Everyone was really nice and thoughtful and genuinely wanted to know about me. The rebrand variant and correlating template file helped us avoid a tangled web of conditionals, and instead boiled down the overhead to a toggle in our ApplicationController. The last straw for using whiteboards came from feedback provided by Betterments Women in Technology group. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. Julia has excellent support for technical computing and mathematical modelling. Reviewing your professional documents before the interview ensures you're well prepared for questions about skills, previous jobs or educational . What are the principles that your team share? For more information about working at Betterment, please visit our Careers page. Under the covers, request specs are just a thin wrapper around Rails integration tests. Asking questions, definitely. I was shocked! If our acceptance criteria change, because everything is written in code, adding a new job involves a simple code change and a few tests, and thats it. Engineers' productivity and happiness decrease as even the smallest tasks can be frustrating and time-consuming. When we found that Rubocops OutputSafety check had some holes, we plugged them. Can we talk about why you decided to become an Engineer? Visualization, Reporting Careful, a trap is looming. Continuous Delivery (CD) at scale is hard to get right. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. 6 more interviews with other potential team members. Unfortunately, our google-fu was bad and we didn't find anything until after we went and implemented something ourselves. Here are a few notes for practitioners about some nuanced issues we ran into, that will hopefully save you some headaches down the line: The Julia runtime has to be initialized before calling the shared library. For example, a group named when a user is logged in tells me that the group of tests relies upon a user in the authenticated state. The main exception to these guidelines is when your controller is an API controller serving data to another app. Inform the roadmap Within three weeks of operations, it became clear that we could use turn-around time metrics from ad-hoc or advisory requests to inform us where we need to invest in project cycles and technology. For example, were representing the expected value of holding VTI in your Taxable as which weve defined to be 0.07. This was mainly because they were faster to run than request specs. These were our outputs. (Dont Repeat Yourself) and to implement UX design changes effectively and uniformly.. A little over a year ago, we rebranded our entire site. 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. The focus of our work has been on delivering a platform as a service to make sense of the complex process of CD. Just the portfolio transition work alone includes significant new code for front-end enhancements which have nothing to do with trading. When writing code, we try to keep in mind that we probably won't come back later and clean up the code, and that we never know who the next person to touch this code will be. 3 step process for me: If you havent, theres no better time to start than now. For example,secreteditorsensitive_coachwhere coach is the name of the repository. Each account has a 70/30 allocation, and the accounts will add up to 70/30 in the aggregate, but we can do better when it comes to maximizing after-tax returns. Effectively, this means maintaining only a baseline level of workers throughout the day and scaling up during peaks when our workload increases. For this we can use a mathematical programming solver. We can enforce access rules by using the affordances of our relational data without the need for any additional permission framework. "trust-root chaining"), and then pass the resulting object into your model instead of the unsafe parameter. This led us to pursue an integration testing solution for flutter. It's a standard test double, and it does the trick. Before diving head first into the code, we made it a priority to be cognizant of the engineering challenges we would face. Less JavaScript. Examples of projections and recommendations at Betterment. We look forward to continuing to build upon Airflow and contributing back to the community. Phone Screen with a recruiter to go over your experience Team Screen with a colleague Case Study that was never sent out because I was ghosted. Stay tuned. This resulted in app code (the content-specific code) becoming entangled with system (the base HTML) code. Distributed workers used with AmazonsAuto Scaling Groupsallow us to automatically add and remove workers based on outstanding tasks in our queues. From an engineering standpoint, the end goal was to integrate much of the original IRA calculators code, plus additional calculations, into Betterments Web application to create RetireGuide as a consumer-facing tool. Some examples: html_safe: [1] pry(main)> include ActionView::Helpers::OutputSafetyHelper => Object [2] pry(main)> result = hi.html_safe => hi [3] pry(main)> result.class => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer raw: [1] pry(main)> result = raw(hi) => hi [2] pry(main)> result.class => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer safe_concat: [1] pry(main)> include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper => Object [2] pry(main)> buffer1 = hi.html_safe => hi [3] pry(main)> result = buffer1.safe_concat(bye) => hibye [4] pry(main)> result.class => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer safe_join: [1] pry(main)> include ActionView::Helpers::OutputSafetyHelper => Object [2] pry(main)> result = safe_join([hi, bye]) =>
hi
bye
[3] pry(main)> result.class => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer Rubocop: weresafe! They're an answer to the question "how can we approximate end-to-end tests for a fraction of the cost?" Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? The notifications were slightly more nuanced than good/bad, but you get the idea. Proper reliability is the greatest operational requirement for any service2. 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. We never got the logic quite right around determining whose code was being deployedthe deploy logic was contingent on a pretty rough shell script called inside a Jenkins job. The best we had was a Slack message that was sent roughly five minutes before a deploy began, tagging a good estimation of contributors but often missing someone if their Github email address was different from their Slack email address. So well need to consider carefully! However, for failures, we didnt want to sit around for five minutes crossing our fingers hoping that everything was successful only to be told that we could have known three minutes earlier that wed forgotten a newline at the end of one of our files. Timeline Another change is that the entire onsite interview is completed in a single day. There are repos, each repo has one or more projects of any type. Normally, running this Monte Carlo would have taken nearly a full year to complete on a single computer, but we created a far more nimble system by piecing together a number of existing technologies. We hone our interview process to ensure youre able to show us your best self. onsite-to-offer rate (industry . Julia ticks the box for this requirement as well by using ajust-in-time compilerthat accommodates both interactive and non-interactive workflows well. As of July 2016, all full-stack, mobile, and site-reliability engineering roles have adopted this new approach. When loading the dynamic library (whether through Ruby-FFI or some other invocation of `dlopen`), make sure to pass the flags `RTLD_LAZY` and `RTLD_GLOBAL` (`ffi_lib_flags :lazy, :global` in Ruby-FFI). At deploy time, the Coach web-app consumes these files and idempotently create Datadog monitors, which can be used as SLIs (service level indicators) to inform SLOs, or as standalone alerts that need immediate triage every time they're triggered. The bottlenecks in business analytics had been the speed of human arithmetic or the hours available on corporate mainframes operated by only a few specialists. 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. 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).