betterment software engineer interview betterment software engineer interview

And no one needs to manually edit the.circleci/config.ymlfile again. 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. Its a really exciting time to be a software engineer, especially in fintech. Reusable parts of code remove the burden from engineers for things like CSS and allows time to focus on and tackle other problems. But the point is that jobs are never simply dropped, or silently deleted, or lost to the cyber-aether, at any point, from the moment we enqueue them to their eventual resolution. The gem includes a tiny Julia project with the API library as its only dependency. Reviewing your professional documents before the interview ensures you're well prepared for questions about skills, previous jobs or educational . Part Iexplores several design choices we made in building out our notifications pipeline and describes how those choices are emblematic of our overarching engineering principles here at Betterment. Make a feature or two. Can you speak to some techniques that have personally proven effective for you in overcoming impostor syndrome? Changing the objective function and adding new constraints needed to be easy to do. We useUpstartto define all Airflow services and simply wrap the TERM behavior in our workers post-stop script, sending the TERM signal first, waiting until we see the Celery process stopped, then finally poweroff the machine. Rewriting R to JavaScript enabled knowledge sharing and further code vetting across teams to ensure our calculations are 100% accurate. Getting to work with talented, smart people who want to make a difference. Finally, weve added an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessionanother idea provided by our Women in Technology group. If an application absolutely needs to be able to show certain data, consider structuring the endpoint in a way such that a client cant even attempt to request another users data. 3 step process for me: 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. Dan Kubb has been working as a Senior Staff Software Engineer for Betterment for 393 days. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. Get started with your Free Employer Profile, The Ultimate Job Interview Preparation Guide. The first of these issues was that the cop allowed usage ofrawandhtmlsafewhen the usages were wrapped insafejoin. Youll thank yourself when you need to update the input data, and your successors and colleagues will be thankful they know what youre basing your conclusions on. Betterment recruiter reached out to me about a Trading team opening. Server app for the TestTrack multi-platform split-testing and feature-gating system. I am passionate about making a positive impact on society through the construction of safe . From an applications perspective, this relationship between a biometric scanner and the Secure Enclave is simplified to a boolean response. By partnering with Peoplism and building a long-term, action-oriented plan, were working to create real change in a sustainable fashion. One next step were excited about is an examination of our mentorship program to make sure that everyone at Betterment has access to mentors. We can collectively build and share a body of interrelated principles driven by insights that our industry as a whole hasnt yet realized or is just beginning to understand. Explore. - Phone screen, nice recruiter. Too often, the events involved forced networking and stodgy PowerPoint presentations, with takeaways amounting to little more than a free glass of wine. safeconcathas the same functionality asrawandhtmlsafeit simply marks the content safe as is by returning it in aSafeBuffer. 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. However, reimplementing our financial models in a very different language exposed a number of engineering concerns. This leads to less test setup and fewer tests per model to establish confidence that the code is behaving as expected. Given these reasons, Julia is the perfect language to serve as a solution to the two-language problem. We also manage a separate repository for SLO definitions. 1. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. They accomplished that by hiding the users legal name in a dropdown accordion that is toggled closed by default. The simulations were detailed enough to replicate how theyd run in our live systems, and included, for example, annual tax payments due to capital gains over losses, cashflows from dividends and the client saving or withdrawing. 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. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? We made a good effort to understand it. Every component is on brand and consistent with every other app, feels polished, high quality and requires lower effort to implement. But what happens when our workers are busy with other work during a deploy? Final round was 2, 30 minute behavioral & soft skills interviews. Lets talk about why you chose Betterment. These include authentication, view rendering, selecting an http response code, redirecting, and setting cookies. Felt as if it was waste of my valuable time, not just with the interviews but for case study as well. 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. You should follow GitLab's example and make Ruby a requirement if you're going to continue your practice of having an onsite where Ruby is the only allowed language. The culture of learning. 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. The notifications were slightly more nuanced than good/bad, but you get the idea. If we dont escape content properly, we could open ourselves and our customers up to security risks. We recently re-optimized our portfolio to include more complex asset allocations and risk models (and it will soon be available). NDA signed. 10 Common job interview questions for Civil Engineer. After this process, I am a fan of Betterment. By keeping the authorization up front in the controller and out of the model, weve made it easier to reason about. Implementation Given how new Julia is, there was minimal literature on true interoperability with other programming languages (particularly high-level languagesRuby, Python, etc). 1 Betterment Software Engineer Mobile IOS interview questions and 1 interview reviews. These are not leetcode problems, these are asking you to implement functionality using ruby on rails. This is a great way to get a good signal while reducing unnecessary noise. Bootstrapping is a process by which you take random chunks of historical data and re-order it. This project would be no exception. Create an input queue: We created a bucket with every simulationmore than 200,000we wanted to run. We Scrum, we Git, and we Jenkins. Dont write the same test three times - for example, it is unnecessary to have a model spec, request spec, and a system spec that are all running assertions on the business logic responsibilities of the model. If you're interviewing for a domain-specific role, expect the questions to center around the specific technology you specialize in, such as AWS or cloud infrastructure, or IoT. How did you overcome that feeling? This forces extra thought and extra conversation in code review to ensure that the usage is in fact safe. Vim! Overall, the process was great. Well, we aim to find an affordable, maintainable spot on that testing spectrum a la Justin Searls' advice. Sounds simple enough! 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. One tech phone screen, 5 hrs on site with other team leads, hiring manager, CTO, and a follow-up 2hrs onsite tech interview, offer was made. Throughout this journey, we learned many things along the way. That isn't to say that they're not worth it for some teams or for a subset of the features in your app. 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. If youre not familiar with asset location, it is a strategy designed to optimize after-tax returns by placing tax-inefficient securities into more tax-advantaged accounts, such as 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). In our experience, it has always taken longer than expected. I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. Modifying our integration with SimonData in order to bulk update our outgoing emails, and Changing how we share a users name with our customer service (CX) team through a Zendesk integration, as well as in our internal CX application. These questions open up an entirely different can of worms, one that we would prefer remained firmly sealed. That means that our goal when writing tests should be to figure out how to achieve our target level of confidence that our features work as intended as affordably as possible. At Betterment, were working on our own set of initiatives to drive the conversation. and raise offenses if any of these values get passed into methods that could lead to a vulnerability (e.g. According to LinkedIn Dan Kubb started working on 1999, then the employee has changed 7 companies and 5 jobs. If you remember nothing else, remember this. Lyft, Arcadia, Betterment, PlayVS, Ezoic. 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. This was a wonderful opportunity to practice targeted universalism: a concept that explains how building features specifically for a marginalized audience not only benefit the people in that marginalized group, but also people outside of it, which increases its broad impact. We cannot assign Joe more money than he already has, nor can we move money between his Roth IRA and taxable accounts. Extending AirflowCode Airflow tasks that pass data to each other can run on different machines, presenting a new challenge versus running everything on a single machine. We needed a workflow with less of a bottleneck, but allowing every developer access to all the secrets across the organization wasnotan acceptable answer. 4. Using Targeted Universalism To Build Inclusive Features The best products are inclusive at every stage of the design and engineering process. First, the Monte Carlo The testing framework we used to assess our algorithmic strategies needed to fulfill a number of criteria to ensure we were making robust and informed decisions. This post is part of series of articles written by Betterments 2013 summer interns. Given requirements, explain how one may model some data. Betterment is one of them. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? Search. 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. You can read more about this approach here. By writing that YAML inside of Ruby classes we can grow and expand our pipeline as needed, trusting that our tests confirm the YAML looks how we expect it to look. In addition, Rails has a few methods that provide help in escaping content. Its worth it. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? From a list of strings, print them out in groups that are anagrams of each other. Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. That will reduce friction! So we tried that. The hardware feature of the Secure Enclave included on iPhones since the 5S make for a readilytrustworthy connection to the device and its operating system. In sops, weve found a tool that combines all of these things enabling a workflow that makes secrets management easier. In addition to problems arising from the types of questions asked, we saw that one of our primary interview tools, the whiteboard, was actually getting in the way; many candidates struggled to communicate their solutions using a whiteboard in an interview setting. Take a minute and review this controller - what jumps out to you? Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. When the day of the big reveal arrived, all that would be left to do was toggle the flag to unveil the code wed shipped and tested weeks before. Our hiring managers now report that they have a much clearer understanding of what each candidate brings to the table. Got the first interview in about 3 weeks. That tells WebValve what requests to intercept and route to this fake. I interviewed at Betterment in Feb 2021, 3 weeks total, (4 if you make it to final onsite, each interview occured on a separate week) We use Slack, like a lot of other companies, so that part of the messaging story wouldnt change, but there were bugs we needed to fix and design flaws we needed to update. Betterment, I like your company and I will continue using your products, but your onsite interview isn't a test of tech skills, it's a test of Ruby knowledge. I highly recommend using it. The component consists of 3 parts: structure, behavior and appearance. However, I'm here to tell you (or maybe just remind you) that tests and test coverage aren't the goal in and of themselves. 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. While new products can often be achieved using our existing engineering abstractions, TCP brought the engineering team a new level of complexity that required us to rethink how parts of our portfolio management system were built. The umbrella term observability covers all manner of subjects, from basic telemetry to logging, to making claims about longer-term performance in the shape of service level objectives (SLOs) and occasionally service level agreements (SLAs). Maintaining a Queue in the Long Run Operating a queue means being able to respond to errors and recover from failures, and also being generally able to tell when things are falling behind. Dont Did you know that even when run sequentially, this will print A,B,D,C,E? This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. 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. Or ask the execs at JPMorgan who lost $6 billion in the London Whale trading debacle, also due in part of poor data practices in Excel. Another option is to start tracking the level of operational complexity for their systems. Im Jesse, a recruiter here at Betterment, and I had the immense pleasure of working closely with these two. If we do this right, we will be able to swap everything to a normal Rails app with minimal effort. This would entail a lot of code changes, however, as an engineering team we believe deeply in carving up big endeavors into small pieces. Linear programs try to optimize the value of an objective function. Its a term weve co-opted from ssl certificate lingo, and its meant to imply a chain of ownership from the authenticated user to a target resource. Sops encrypts and decrypts your secret values using your cloud providers Key Management Service (AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault) and PGP as a backup in the event those services are not available. Rubocop, a popular Ruby static analysis tool, provides a cop (which is what Rubocop calls a check) to alert us when were using these methods:Rails/OutputSafety. I interviewed at Betterment (Columbia, MD) in May 2022. Rebranding a feature involved adding new styles to the application_rebrand.css and implementing them in new rebrand view files. First we add the gem to our Gemfile and run bundle install. For the most part, the code collects fake responses and then smartly spits them back out when requested. onsite-to-offer rate (industry . While we may implement a hot-standby backup in the future, we simply accept it as a known risk and set our monitoring system to notify a team member of any deviances. Everyone was really nice and thoughtful and genuinely wanted to know about me. Most teams need to deploy to multiple environments: production, staging, feature branches, sales demos, etc. HR screen followed by a technical phone screen and final round. We can rewrite this test so that each test would pass if it were run first. This means that when we naturally hit vertical scaling limits, we could, for example, shard or partition our job table alongside our users table. These are REALLY basic things that you can do if you have some rails experience, but if its your first time looking at it, you're SOL, and your interviewers will at best try to nudge you to the right documentation page to read mid interview. INSTEAD OF THIS: postparameters = params.permit(:albumid, :caption) Post.new(post_parameters) DO THIS: album = currentuser.albums.find(params[:albumid]) post_parameters = params.permit(:caption).merge(album: album) Post.new(post_parameters) See here for more information on this error: https://github.com/Betterment/betterlint/blob/main/README.md#bettermentauthorizationincontroller AttachmentLink.new(create_params.merge(document: document)).save! Longer answer: Here at Betterment, we use both. ): The New World is cleaner, easier to grok, and more immediately helpful: The link title to GitHub is the commit diff itself, and it takes you to the compare URL for that changeset. We reach our SLO goal if, during a 30 day period, 99.9% of all requests completed with one of those status codes and within that range of latency. 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. chicken:2.000lbs(2.0instock) carrots:3.501lbs(5.0instock) thyme:3.017lbs(16.0instock) onions:4.568lbs(10.0instock) noodles:0.000lbs(3.0instock) garlic:0.435lbs(1.0instock) parsley:0.435lbs(2.0instock) 8.632lbsoffoodfromNewman's. Fortunately, it was a fun experience and it really took very little time! The overall value of Joes holdings are a function of the specific funds in which he has investments. Also, I didn't think I would ever say this, but the recruiter I worked with throughout the process was truly amazing. This type of bug is typically referred to as an Insecure Direct Object Reference vulnerability. We are so lucky to have you! The phenomenon, Williams said, is something that she has seen particularly among high-achieving womenwhere self-doubt becomes an obstacle for professional development. This new pattern will make building out newer and even more sophisticated features easier, so we can focus on encapsulating the business logic once. In this example, we want to maximize the expected value of the holdings in Joes accounts. When I sat down with them to solicit feedback on our entire hiring process, they pointed to the whiteboard problem-solving dynamics (one to two engineers sitting, observing, and judging the candidate standing at a whiteboard) as unnatural and awkward. When we set up a new plugin and we wrap it in a class that we inject into our app. We use cutting-edge technology to build cutting-edge technology. We can also set a warning threshold if we want to be notified earlier when were using up our error budget. For that, our app has a thin wrapper around the http package called HttpClient. Customers looking to fine-tune their desired annual savings and retirement age in real time would have to wait for our server to respond to each scenariothose added seconds become noticeable and can impair functionality. Hence, WebValve. What resource is the authenticated user operating on? Those come to life in four major principles, which guide how we engage with the problem space for our shift to a service-oriented architecture: We use HTTP & REST to communicate with collaborator services We define the boundaries and limit the testing of integrations with contract tests We don't share code across service boundaries Engineers must remain nimble and building features must remain enjoyable. The process took 1 week. For APIs that we build for ourselves (e.g. How to turn simple questions into solutions. We were able to do this by having our app widget that handles dependency setup take a child, then pumping the app widget wrapped around whatever feature widget we wanted to test. 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. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. Shh Its a Secret: Managing Secrets at Betterment Opinionated secrets management that helps us sleep at night. Fidel Severino: While working, I would take any available time for courses on websites like Codecademy and Team Treehouse. 3. I interviewed at Betterment. And for our server, we need to add a route, a controller, a model, and a jbuilder to render that model as JSON. They were happy to answer any questions I had and were very thorough in explaining what to expect and their expectations. In short, we tested a heckuva a lot of data. When a PR is merged, our team takes care of redistributing the new version of the library so engineers can update their configuration. 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). Below is an example request spec. However, in more complex testing scenarios, this dependency wont be as obvious. Were using AmazonsDatabase Migration Service(DMS) to replace our Luigi-implemented replication solution and re-building all other Luigi workflows in Airflow. Also, if database changes are part of the project (e.g. Instead, when a new test is introduced that requires that dependency, the decision can be made to share it in such a way that its state gets reset prior to each test or to not share it at all and have each test create and set up the dependency itself. Weve achieved our goalweve allowed for all the functionality of integration without the threats of actual integration. This becomes even more dangerous if the Documents table uses sequential ids, as that would make it easy for an attacker to start combing through the entire table. "trust-root chaining"). There are a number of subjects that need to be covered in order to ensure you are ready for back-to-back questions on algorithms, data structures, design, optimization and honestly just an ever . 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. Dealing With the Uncertainty of Legacy Code To complete our portfolio optimization, we had to tackle a lot of legacy code. I have experience in several different backend/ frontend frameworks, yet rails has some specific quirks, and your interviewers will not help you in this regard, but will simply try to see how you figure out, so they basically force you to google mid interview, and set you on a timer. At Betterment, we definitely prefer to be closer to the 100% coverage end of the spectrum, but we know that in practice that's not really a feasible end state if we want to ship changes quickly and deliver rapid feedback to our engineers about their proposed changes. Investing the time to run Airflow as a cluster versus a single machine allows us to run work in a more elastic manner, saving costs and using optimized hardware for particular jobs. It is also important in our research code where the iterative nature of research means we often have to re-run financial simulations or models multiple times with slight tweaks. Complete a pair programming exercise consisting of some starter code and finishing out a key function. The Code Solution: Make It Functional Given we have to manage penny allocations between a persons goals often throughout our codebase, the last thing wed want is to have to bake penny-pushing logic throughout our domain logic. A Short History of Data in Business First, a step back in the business time machine. Just as the Ford Motor Company created efficiency with assembly line production and Pixar opened up new worlds by computerizing animation, companies now are innovating and improving the craft of using data to do business. One Massive Monte Carlo, One Very Efficient Solution We optimized our portfolio management algorithms in six hours for less than $500. The beginning of our Flutter testing journey Up until early 2020, our mobile app was entirely native with separate android and iOS codebases. We hone our interview process to ensure youre able to show us your best self. For instance, is the dollar amount above the target balance in emerging markets bondsthe asset class to where VWOB belongs. The main recurring issue was that hiring managers were left uncertain as to whether a candidate truly possessed the technical aptitude and skills to justify making them an employment offer. Variable server response times do not provide an optimal user experience, especially when performing personalized financial projections. 2) Small take home problem, mostly about correctly reading requirements and providing an implementation. Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401 (k) for small and medium-sized businesses. Until now, we executed transactions based on fixed weights or a precise allocation of assets to every level of risk. Examine the following types of interviews you may encounter during the software engineer hiring process to help you better prepare: Phone screens The phone screening portion of a software engineer interview usually begins with a brief conversation with a recruiter. In this post, well explore that principle and dive into how we committed 5000 line configuration files to our repositories with confidence by standardizing CI for different runtimes, automating configuration generation in code, and testing the process that generates that configuration. And then we applied our learnings going forward. In the end, we landed on our own flavor of a pair programming interview. The introduction of the spreadsheet defined the beginning of the business analytics era, but the scale and complexity of todays data has outgrown that origin. We're not just writing code. But, there will also be times when we're running in a local development environment and we want to communicate with a real collaborator service to do some true integration testing. More critically, the one-off script solution wasnt stored in source control, therefore it wasnt tested. We run millions of these so-called background jobs daily using a SQL-backed queuenot Redis, or RabbitMQ, or Kafka, or, um, you get the pointand weve very intentionally made this choice, for reasons that will soon be explained! At first, I thought my lack of exposure to finance put me at a disadvantage. What behavioral and market shifts can we expect to see from fintech in the next five to 10 years? Ask-me-anything1:1 with an engineer on another team, 3. This, in theory, means that all jobs can be written in more or less the same way, regardless of the job-execution backend. Putting it alltogether Our configuration generator is doing a lot more than just taping together jobs in a workflowwe evaluate dependency graphs and only run certain jobs that have upstream changes or are triggered themselves.