betterment software engineer interview

How long does it take your computer to open a million row spreadsheet? The.circleci/config.ymlfile was getting longer than a thousand lines fast, partly because we didnt want to use any YAML shortcuts to hide away what was being run, and partly because there were no higher-level mechanisms available at the time for re-use when writing YAML (e.g. 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. The special sauce is that it works for more than just your tests. Onboarding a newproject One of the main reasons for standardizing the interface and automating the configuration generation was to onboard new applications more quickly. Meetings thus far have included a panel discussion on breaking into tech from the corporate world and a small-group financial discussion led by financial experts from Betterment and beyond. 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. Manual updates to this file allow the configuration for infrequently-modified projects to drift. How likely is it that youll spot a copy-paste error at row 403,658? Store results in central location: We used another Amazon Cloud service called S3 to store the results of each simulation. This also fosters conversation, natural networking, and the chance for women to get their foot in the door. To ensure true randomness, always pass random as the seed. The complexity partly arose from the fact that we needed to duplicate business logic from the backend and the frontend. To test our algorithms-as-strategies, we simulated the thousands of potential futures they might encounter. Top Software Engineering Manager Interview Questions and - medium.com Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. 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. 4. Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. With python, its helpful to know that we can pull the pounds of food for a particular ingredient out of x, i.e, [a1,b1,c1,d1] with x[ingredient_index::num_of_ingredients] Likewise, we can pull out the ingredients for a given store with x[store_index*num_of_ingredients:store_index*num_of_ingredients+num_of_ingredients] e.g, [b1,b2,b3,b4,b5,b6,b7] For this example, were using the scipy.optimize.minimize function using the NLSQP method. They were honest and straight shooter, got a good sense of the mainly good and bad working at Betterment. This can be accomplished by establishing a secure session on the server and running what you would normally run to get a console with the sopsorific run command. At Betterment, we build public facing applications without an authorization framework by following three principles, discussed in another blog post. Tell us a bit about your life before Betterment. They also give background on the role and team structure. In the near term, look for smaller pieces of the analytical workflow which would benefit especially from the efficiencies of reproducible, programmatic analysis and reporting. They're an answer to the question "how can we approximate end-to-end tests for a fraction of the cost?" Non-CPU intensive tasks (e.g. 1 Betterment Software Engineering interview questions and 1 interview reviews. We hired Jesse Harrelson (Betterment for Advisors Team) and Fidel Severino (Retail Team) for a 90 day Apprentice Program. Now, the frontend just needs to blindly listen to the server, and render the HTML as instructed. - Final interview, stay on one project, swap groups of different interviewers. Optimal Testing Because we use these three different categories of specs, its important to keep in mind what each type of spec is for to avoid over-testing. To set up a new app all you need to do is be in the directory for your project and then runcoach create project --type $project_type. The usage pattern is for folks to connect to client_analytics and from there to: cross-query against the betterment_live schema, import/export and manipulate custom datasets with Python or R, perform regression and analysis, etc. Come work side-by-side with our team, laptops open, and solve problems together. The optimization package were using in this example, pythons scipy.optimize, provides a very expressive interface for specifying all of those bounds and constraints. In the final Capstone Project, you'll apply your skills to analyze data collected from a real-world (social) network. Now, updating CI requires opening a PR to make the change. Enqueues and Transactions See, theres a major gotcha that may not be obvious from the list of ActiveJob backends. Step 2: 2-3 hour pair programming technical round in an IDE. If its a reasonable addition to CI, our thought is that everyone should benefit. The resulting analytical master file was still large, but small enough to fit on a regular MacBook Pro. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. Those bootcamps changed all of our lives! In other words, the following test file will always exit successfully, despite the fact that there are obvious issues with how its set up. Those interviewers dont fill out a scorecard, and our hiring managers are forbidden from discussing candidates with them. Rails provides rich template resolver logic at every level of the view hierarchy, and we were able to easily hook into it by simply modifying the extensions of our new layout files. In doing all of these things, weve reduced bottlenecks for developers so they can focus more on shipping features and less on managing secrets. The process took 3 weeks. This means that we have to also inject fake implementations of any plugins we use. A 2 part Byteboard interview, a technical reasoning exercise and code implementation exercise in JavaScript. Looking for the best java software engineer interview questions to ask candidates during your hiring process? talked about the company and the role. If youre the first convert, absolutism is probably not the right approach. The remaining test harness code was put in our normal codebase where it can be iterated on freely. 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). We left this outside of application code so that teams can modify SLO target goals and details without having to redeploy the application itself. 5.00% 2.000lbsofparsley. Why dont we use Controller Specs? What value does a Technical program manager brings to a team? 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). Step 3: 2-hour behavioral round. Siddhi Bhanushali - Software Engineering Intern - Tala | LinkedIn Lets assume that a User has many Attachments that can be attached to a Document they own. The props are a fancier attr_accessor with the bonus of being able to assign defaults. Seemed mostly focused on identifying your work style. We wanted to build our platform around what our engineers would need to know, when they need to know it, and how often. 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). To migrate to Airflow, were deprecating our Luigi solution on two fronts: cross-database replication and task orchestration. This might seem like a show stopper, but we get around it by negating our objective function, minimizing, and then negating the results. What do you think are the biggest trends of our time in this space? The component consists of 3 parts: structure, behavior and appearance. What does it mean to escapecontent? The additional layer of frontend complexity made it even harder for new hires to be productive from day one. However, in Airflow we reversed our thinking to embrace DMS, using Airflows sensor operators to wait for rows to be pushed from DMS before carrying on with dependent tasks. 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. Crys also built out a delightful flow that shows the user why we require their legal name, that answers a few common questions, and allows them to edit their preferred first name in the future if needed. Aside from partials, there was corresponding styling, or CSS, that was being copied and sometimes changed when these shared partials were altered. Iteration doesnt stop at code. No existing library allows us to integrate this way and map HTTP requests to in-process fakes for integration and development. This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. Too little testing doesnt give any confidence in system behavior and does not protect against regressions. 16.0availableacrossallstores. In Betterments mobile apps, this means including trustworthy but convenient local authentication options for resuming active login sessions. I identified the most visible spots where we address a user and changed them, but for less visible changes I took this new map and delegated cross-squad ownership of each usage. So if you havent already, make sure to enable test randomization in your Flutter codebase today! The first round of "in person" interviews. If it would, the user is instead forced to either fix the changes that lead to a downstream breakage, or to modify the registration to be a major version increase. This is where SLOs come in. Questions were in JavaScript, ruby on rails, and React having to implement specific features into a pre developed app. Understanding these tradeoffs is what helped our Engineering team at Betterment decide on a solution that made the most sense for our applications. Here are the top interview tools for software engineers, along with everything you need to know before making a decision on which solution to buy: pricing, implementation, candidate experience, etc. When jobs run, they emit ActiveSupport::Notification events that we subscribe to and then forward along to a StatsD emitter, typically as distribution or increment metrics. Typically, variants are prescribed to help render distinct views for different device types, but they are equally powerful when rendering distinct HTML/CSS for any significant redesign. Bootstrapping is a process by which you take random chunks of historical data and re-order it. The sample code below illustrates how we generated the constraints for our model. Check it out on GitHub. We supportwordpress_app,java_library,java_app,ruby_gem,ruby_app, andjavascript_libraryfor now. In fact, sometimes it was hard to even know where to start to make changes. Instead of using a client side MVC framework to help enable us to write a single page app, we opted to use our Rails server to render views, and we used server generated JavaScript responses to make the app feel just as snappy for our customers. How did you overcome that feeling? This is a rails specific interview, where you get a rails app and you go through it fixing and creating features. 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. Say that we want to start by testing the profile edit flow. One of the tools we use to approach this challenge on the engineering team is a popular Javascript framework called Backbone. We implemented a local fallback mixin for Airflow maintained hooks that uses the local filesystem for development and testing, deferring to the actual hooks remote functionality only on production. Recruiter was great in connecting me with more engineers and managers to get more insight onto the role and culture. If theyre in our codebase, we should be able to iterate on the fakes without having to restart our server; the behavior isnt always right the first time, and restarting is tedious and it's not the Rails Way. The content on this page is reflective of a specific point in time (as of the publication date). 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. You are viewing a web property located at Betterment.com. Working closely with Product, Design, Marketing, and Research, we brainstorm, ideate, build, and push our thinking and perspectives. But take a look at the first onenotice the 100+ lines of (omitted) code. Julia also has a very rich type system where researchers can build prototypes without type declarations, and then later refactoring the code where needed with type declarations for dispatch or clarity. From here, we set out to break down responsibilities of the components of our integration tests. On Fishbowl, you can share insights and advice anonymously with Betterment employees and get real answers from people on the inside. Performance Review Generator Create a peer to peer review using performance evaluation phrases. To get there we had to make all of our Java apps respond to the same set of commands, and all of our Ruby apps to do the same. The optimization will be partly driven by a more sophisticated asset allocation algorithm, which will dynamically vary individual asset allocations within the stock and bond basket based on a goals overall allocation. Okay brass tacks. 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. Upon gem installation, we fetch the Julia source and compile it as a native extension. At Betterment, we rely on said jobs extensively, to limit the amount of work performed during the critical path of each web request, and also to perform scheduled tasks at regular intervals. In order to do this, we built out a fake http client that allows us to configure network responses for given requests. All products, services, and content obtained from a linked website are provided as is without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, security, or accuracy. In addition, the RSpec team recommends using system specs instead of feature specs. We try to avoid testing declarations directly in model specs - well talk more about that in a future blog post on testing model behavior, not testing declarations. Were continually evaluating whether to adopt this process for other roles, as well. Variable server response times do not provide an optimal user experience, especially when performing personalized financial projections. Each TradingConstraintGenerator knows about all of the system related data it needs to generate constraints. These tests use the same widgetTester API that regular Widget tests use but they are designed to run on a simulator, emulator, or preferably a real device. This also meant that we ended up with an API that fit our exact needs rather than having to reframe our approach to fit what nock was able to offer us. . Regardless, given that it has the same problems that flutter_driver does, we decided not to pursue integration_test as our framework. First there was an online assessment by ByteBoard. Lets say it is. Throughout the process, we identified several discrepancies between JavaScript and R function outputs, so we regularly reconciled the differences. We use a little command line utility to assume the role and are dropped into a secret-editor session where they use sops to add or edit secrets with their editor in the same way they add or edit code in a feature branch. Typically, they use real devices or sometimes a simulator/emulator and real backend services. Perhaps wed want to generalize the approach even further. We think that our Web app will be just as pleasant to use, and we can more quickly enhance and build new features going forward. The success of projects like these dont come down to the code itselfit comes down to the design of the solution based on its specific needs. Overall, I got the impression their interview process is very focused on cultural fit and enthusiasm for the product more than anything else. Not only was this frustrating, but it was inefficient. Lets say weve defined some SLOs and notice they are falling behind over time. This is the second part of a series of posts about our new CI/CD platform,Coach. Another option is to start tracking the level of operational complexity for their systems. That will reduce friction! So we tried that. The calculator focuses on just one part of the broader set of retirement calculations, and doesnt have the functionality to automatically import customers existing information. And we've even written on why we did it. I didn't connect too well with one of the managers in the final round and saw the rejection coming. Here's a peek inside of the Charlatan API. To learn more, we encourage you to watch the below video featuring Betterments Sam Moore, a lead engineer, who reveals the new framework at a Meetup in Betterments NYC offices. 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. 1. The engineering spirit, the drive to craft and build the quality service for our customers that we dream and crave for ourselves, is how Betterment began, and its how well shape the future. Along the way, we were able to contribute back to a great community. Generating these constraints that ultimately determine buying and selling decisions can often involve tricky business logic that examines a variety of data in our system. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. Building new products can often be done using our existing engineering abstractions. 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. Their office is ok-ish. We solve problems from different angles. 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. From a high level view I essentially split this large engineering lift into two different streams of work. Updating the most visible spots in our application. In order to build this, we needed to do two overhauls: 1) Build a new CI pipeline and 2) Build a new CD pipeline. What could happen if we dont escapecontent? 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. As a result, we had to build features into sopsorific to allow vendor provided secrets that didnt meet the sopsorific standards by default to be accepted by sopsorifics checks. This led to maintenance issues, and it made our application harder to test. Our work consisted of collaborating with our marketing, analytics, and product teams to establish systems and practices that: Measure progress towards high level goals Optimize growth and conversion Support product and project strategy Improve customer outcome A guide to tactical decisions With these requirements in mind, here are some of the tactical decisions we made from the start to get our new data team off the ground. We stay in regular contact with stakeholders throughout a build-out and iterate over MVPs. 40.00% 4.800lbsofcarrots. Key handling and authorization policy design is tricky to get right and sops doesnt do it all for us. When I started my engineering internship at Betterment, I barely knew anything about finance. That tells WebValve what requests to intercept and route to this fake. When we found that Rubocops OutputSafety check had some holes, we plugged them. Weve baked several improvements into the delayed gem, including a highly optimized, SKIP LOCKED-based pickup query, multithreaded workers, and a novel max percent of max age metric that we use to automatically scale our worker pool up to ~3x its baseline size when queues need additional concurrency. 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 . Discussion Finally, weve added an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessionanother idea provided by our Women in Technology group. Even with this plan, migrating a highly complex web application isnt easy. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? I applied, heard back, interviewed, and was rejected within a 2 week time frame. Friction here refers to ambiguity of CI results and the uncertainty of knowing where your code is in the CI/CD process. 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. Modern Data Analysis: Dont Trust Your Spreadsheet To conduct research in business, you need statistical computing that you easily reproduce, scale, and make accessible to many stakeholders. Here's how they did it. Its a spectrum. The Mathematical Solution: Integer Allocation We chose to tackle the problem by working with integers instead of decimal numbers in order to avoid rounding. One challenge we have that most existing iOS apps share is the need to still support older iOS versions. The range listed is just one component of Betterment's total compensation package for employees. Whats missing? Betterment Lead Software Engineer Interview Questions iOS also had some tests that were flaky, causing CI builds to fail unexpectedly. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in May 2019. Coachis the beginning of that platform. 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. I had two exceptional mentors who went above and beyond and removed any blocks preventing me from accomplishing tasks. If embedding your Julia library into a multi-threaded application, youll need additional tooling to only initialize and make calls into the Julia library from a single thread, as multiple calls to `jl_init`will error. Discussion Finally, weve added an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessionanother idea provided by our Women in Technology group. Separately, they could set up a taxable retirement account invested likewise in 90% stocks and 10% bonds. How to remove legacy code During our portfolio optimization, we had to come up with a framework for dealing with pieces of old code. The second area we wanted to stub out was the network. 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. There were task forces cobbled together to drive up reliability of the test suite, to stamp out flakes, to rewrite, and to refactor. I found Chethan to be highly proactive, organised and considerate as a teammate. I knew I didnt want to work at a big bank, but I did want to learn more about the industry that employed 16.6% of my classmates at Yale.

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betterment software engineer interview