betterment software engineer interview
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. Questions were in JavaScript, ruby on rails, and React having to implement specific features into a pre developed app. 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. But once we looked under the surface, #firstname was sprinkled nearly everywhere in our codebase. 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. If we buried the authorization within the model, it would be difficult to ensure that the trust-root chain is being enforced especially if the model is used by multiple controllers that handle authorization inconsistently. The Mathematical Solution: Integer Allocation We chose to tackle the problem by working with integers instead of decimal numbers in order to avoid rounding. Defining the Interface In order to generate the.circleci/config.ymlthat details which jobs to run and what code to execute we first needed to determine what our acceptance criteria was. 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. 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. In order to effectively work on multiple pieces of an app, an engineer needs to be fluent in multiple different languages. Last fall, Betterment optimized its portfolio, moving from the original platform to an upgraded trading platform that included more asset classes and the ability to weight exposure of each asset class differently for every level of risk. Note that the error path and two common success paths are exercised in the same spec. By only using the server as a JSON API, the frontend needed to know exactly what to do with that JSON. Were far from perfect, but this is what were doing to embrace the International Womens Day charge and work toward better gender balance at Betterment and in our world. We love the idea of these tests, the level of confidence they'd give us that our app works as intended, and how they'd eliminate manual QA testing, but we loathe the cost of running them, both in terms of time and actual $$$ of CI execution. Its a constant battle to keep things maintainable, readable, testable, and efficient. There is no /api/socialsecuritynumbers endpoint because it is a prime target for third-party abuse and developer error. Ideally, the same tools you build to understand your data when youre at 10 employees should scale and evolve through your IPO. We developed the SHARE Series to create an authentic and conversational environment, one where attendees help guide the conversations and future event themes. This interactive tool was a great start, but it lives in isolation, away from the holistic Betterment experience. Weve been using these cops for over a year now and have had a lot of success with them. First there was an online assessment by ByteBoard. 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. Paddy, who hosts the meetups, let us know that Betterment was launching an apprenticeship program and after the meetup I asked how I could get involved and applied for the program. Earlier this year, a coworker asked me how difficult it would be to add a preferred name option into our product. To do this, we can relate the terms with the terms using linear constraints. If, for example, our user research says we should aim for 99.5% uptime, thats 3h 21m 36s of downtime available per 28 days. Ensure the same set of acceptance criteria is in place for all codebases in the org. Development and testing also require us to stand up the Airflow database with predefined objects such asconnectionsandpoolsfor the code under test to function properly. Popular Generators . Aside from partials, there was corresponding styling, or CSS, that was being copied and sometimes changed when these shared partials were altered. First, we want an address model, which we map to our /addresses endpoint. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? In his taxable account, Joe holds $5,500 worth of U.S. total market stocks in VTI (Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF), and $5,500 worth of emerging markets bonds in VWOB (Vanguard Emerging Markets Bond ETF). Ship It If your mobile iOS app also displays sensitive information and uses Touch ID for biometry-based local authentication, join us in making the easy adaption to delight your users with full support for Face ID on the iPhone X. Store results in central location: We used another Amazon Cloud service called S3 to store the results of each simulation. Coding challenge and Sys design. Testing & Code Review Strategies Rubocop and Rails tooling can only get us so far in mitigating authorization bugs. We stay in regular contact with stakeholders throughout a build-out and iterate over MVPs. If we say that, a1=poundsofchickenpurchasedfromElaines a2=poundsofcarrotspurchasedfromElaines a3=poundsofthymepurchasedfromElaines a7=poundsofparsleypurchasedfromElaines b1=poundsofchickenpurchasedfromGeorges c1=poundsofchickenpurchasedfromJerrys d1=poundsofchickenpurchasedfromNewmans Were looking to maximize, a1+a2+a3+b1++d7=totalpounds We then have to throw in all of the constraints to our problem. If we fail to meet our goals, its worthwhile to step back and understand why. safeconcathas the same functionality asrawandhtmlsafeit simply marks the content safe as is by returning it in aSafeBuffer. 6 more interviews with other potential team members. Be the first to find this interview helpful. Photo credit: Christine Meintjes Abi: Can you speak about a time in your life where impostor syndrome was limiting in your own career? Heres the view partial from Style Closet: You can see how the component.message is passed into the dedicated space/ slot keeping this code flexible forreuse. A web request was made, code was executed, and by enqueuing a job, we said we'd eventually do something. 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. Additionally, we always deploy multiple baseline Airflow workers in case one fails, in which case we use automated deploys to stand up any part of the Airflow cluster on new hardware. without the complication of a service boundary). 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. I aced all my other onsite interviews and I currently have two offers from FAANG companies and a handful of offers from some other startups. Building new products can often be done using our existing engineering abstractions. Part of that commitment includes reflecting the diversity of those customers. For instance, tasks that saturate CPU are best run on a compute optimized worker with concurrency set to the number of cores. They can define what is called an aspirational SLO - basically an SLO for an important component in their system - to start collecting data over time. Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. Engineering the Launch of a New Brand for Betterment In 2017, Betterment set out tolaunch a new brandto better define the voice and feel of our product. Every component is on brand and consistent with every other app, feels polished, high quality and requires lower effort to implement. 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. Can you speak to some techniques that have personally proven effective for you in overcoming impostor syndrome? Fortunately, it was a fun experience and it really took very little time! In addition to Coach explicitly providing a config-driven interface for monitors, weve also written a couple handy runtime specific methods that result in automatic instrumentation for Rails or Java endpoints. Ill discuss these more below. I applied online. Lets talk about why you chose Betterment. Thanks primarily to the simple addition of theLABiometryTypeenum newly available in iOS 11, its easy for our application to determine which biometry feature, if any, is available on a given device. Members break out and solve problems together, sharing and honing skills, while building community and support. 1) Phone screen about the company The next step was a technical screen over the phone using codepad. In this post, well be sharing that journey. 1. Okay, weve got an app, a test harness, and robots to interact with the screens. In addition, weve consistently received high marks from candidates and interviewers alike, who prefer our revamped approach. Our unit tests are not only to test behavior and drive good design, but should also be readable to the extent that they help document the code itself. 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). As our team has grown impressively from five to more than 50 engineers (and this was just in the last three years), weve significantly improved our abilities to make clearer hiring decisions, as well as shortened our total hiring timeline. I applied online. In just a few weeks, Betterment is launching an updated portfolio -- one that has been optimized for better expected returns. By default, running flutter testwill run your tests in the order theyre written within your test file. Lots of STAR method and cultural fit questions. All of the code that handles changesets and messaging logic in the New World is written in one central location, and its tested in isolation. Once this feature went live, it was extremely rewarding to see our targeted universalism approach reveal its benefits. It can also dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to solve a problem. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. Note that the contribution limits mentioned in this example are as of the time this article was published. Tell me about a time you collaborated at work. Shared code between services creates shared ownership, and shared ownership leads to undesirable coupling. Everyone was very open about what they thought about the company and about what their experience at the company was like. It's a joke feed, but they have some great tech and security points and articles shared there. Following their apprenticeship, they joined us as full-time Junior Engineers. Here you can see how to construct an instance of the Charlatan class and then use its methods like whenGet to configure it with fake responses that we want to see when we make requests to the configured URLs. We talked to other developers who might be more familiar with it. If Betterment has a relationship or affiliation with the author or content, it will note this in additional disclosure. The APM monitor type was simple enough to turn into both a Java annotation and a tiny domain specific language (DSL) for Rails controllers, giving us nice symmetry across our platforms. Many of them took the time to draw diagrams and timelines to accompany their explanations. PGP does irreversible encryption better than anything else readily available and is broadly supported. It eliminated the potential for any code reuse and meant it would take us longer to implement. Commercial Customer Service Representative. (Were also assuming he only wants to make at most one visit to each store.) What to say when thingsfail This is what engineers would see in the Old World when tests failed for an open pull request: Among other deficiencies, theres only one link and it takes us to a Jenkins job. Currently were focusing on building more intricate and and interactive components using React. Jennifer Arguello - I met Jennifer at the White House Tech Inclusion Summit back in 2013, where we hit it off talking about diversity in tech and her time with the Latino Startup Alliance. All interviewers were very nice and easy to talk to, one of the better interview experiences while searching for an entry level role. We still have our route, controller, and model, but instead of a jbuilder for returning JSON, we can port our template to embedded Ruby, and let the server do all the work. I made the jump to start becoming an engineer. Similarly, even our authorized endpoints never allow one user to peer into another users object graph. Find contacts: direct phone number, email address, work experience. All coding exercises were real world examples, no leetcode or theoretical problem solving questions. Lets define that objective function. Below is an example of one of our components, the flash. Each project needs to be built, tested, and linted. 25 Citrus Informatics Engineering - Software & QA Department Reviews by current and past employees about salary & benefits work culture skill development career growth job security work-life balance and more. These interviews are in Ruby on Rails - know ruby on rails beforehand, since it is difficult to read / implement on the spot. We built ourCoach CLIinto the Docker images we use in CircleCI and so those Coach CLI commands are available to us from inside the.circleci/config.ymlfile. I dont hear anyone saying that expensive proprietary data solutions are the future. Jesse Harrelson: The direct mentorship during my apprenticeship and exposure to a large production codebase. For this reason, if you do write characterization tests, we recommend not going too far with them. We turned toAirflowbecause it has emerged as a full-featured workflow management framework better suited to orchestrate frequent tasks throughout the day. We used IronMQ to manage the queue, which allows individual worker nodes to pull inputs themselves instead of relying on a system to monitor worker nodes and push work to them. What are "end-to-end-ish" tests? Ability to keep pace with changes to the mathematical model, e.g., adding, removing, and changing the constraints and the objective function must be quick and painless. Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. Its not always free for Joe to go from his current holdings to optimal ones because buying and selling securities can have tax consequences. Common stages of the interview process at Betterment according to 99 Glassdoor interviews include: Find a Great First Job to Jumpstart Your Career, Stand Out From the Crowd With the Perfect Cover Letter, How to Prepare for Your Interview and Land the Job. Whats Next? In light of that, well cover some helpful strategies for keeping authorization front of mind. Though there are many types of specs, in our workflow we focus on only three: model specs, request specs, and system specs. What would you say has been the most rewarding part of your experience so far? Thankfully, Rails provides an abstraction layer on top of these, in the form of the Active Job framework. 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. For example, we can tag an element with a data-behavior-dropdown, and then we have some simple, well organized global JavaScript that knows how to wrap that element in some code that makes it more interactive. Use your answer to highlight some of the most important skills for a junior software engineer, along with examples of how you've used those skills in the past. As a computer science major, school has taught me how to code in Java, and maybe some of the theoretical stuff that Ive had drilled into my head will come in handy at some point in my life. We also manage a separate repository for SLO definitions. 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. Almost We were thrilled about the introduction of this copwe had actually written custom cops prior to its introduction to protect us against using the methods that dont escape content. Why (And How) Betterment Is Using Julia Betterment is using Julia to solve our own version of the two-language problem." I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. The investment analytics team combined their R functions using Shiny, a tool for building user interfaces in R, and released Betterments IRA calculator as a precursor to RetireGuide. Weve started an internal roundtable to voice our concerns about gender inequality in the workplace, weve sponsored and hosted Women in Tech meetups, and were starting to collaborate with other companies to bring awareness to the issue. This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. Betterments data platform is unique in that it not only supports offline needs such as analytics, but also powers our consumer-facing product. We wanted to highlight metrics such as net deposits, assets under management, and conversions from visitors to the site into Betterment customers. Code defines how your application behaves. Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. 1. Consider a controller that links attachments to a given document. Abletocarry17.0pounds. The gem includes a tiny Julia project with the API library as its only dependency. 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. By going down the path of integration testing, weve been able to increase confidence in everyday changes as well as map out a plan for eliminating our manual test cases. What behavioral and market shifts can we expect to see from fintech in the next five to 10 years? Ruthe Farmer - I first met Ruthe back in 2010 during my senior year of high school when I won the Illinois NCWIT Aspirations Award. Visualization, Reporting Careful, a trap is looming. With that, weve been able to test the integration of all the components for a given flow, all written in widget-test-like style without needing to build out the entire app. New York City: $190,000 - $205,000. 4.5 hr virutal onsite - three 45 min tech interviews with 15 - 30 min breaks. Method to the Madness The crux of our new pattern is this: We use Rails unobtrusive JavaScript (ujs) library to declare that forms and links should be submitted using AJAX. On the one end is 100% test coverage using all the different kinds of tests: solitary unit tests, sociable more-integrated tests, and end-to-end tests; all features, fully covered, no exceptions. Working with Betterments applications gave me a hands-on understanding of concepts that are hard to reproduce on a smaller, personal application level. Finally, we sort our buckets in descending remainder order (because the buckets with the highest remainders are most deserving of extra pennies) and allocate the leftover pennies we have in this order. 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. Its part of the CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) process. Therefore, to make sure we limit chicken to 40% of the overall ingredients, one element of the constraints tuple will be, {'type':'ineq', 'fun':lambdax:sum(extract_ingredient_specific_pounds(x,chicken))(calc_total_pounds_of_food(x)*.4)} Making sure the soup nazi is able to carry everything back from the store: 12a1a2a7>=0 17d1d2d7>=17 Leads to, {'type':'ineq', 'fun':lambdax:max_per_store[store]np.sum(extract_store_specific_pounds(x,store))} Hopefully this gives you enough information to make sense of the code example. In the simple example above with two accounts and two funds, there are a total of four constraints. This looks very similar to a Sinatra app, and that's because it is onewith some additional magic baked in. Its our job to fine-tune these to help our clients, and its very important we have these decisions be robust to the widest possible array of potential futures they might face. 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.
