betterment software engineer interview

internal services) we have full control over how we build them, so using HTTP and REST is no issue. Unfortunately, its not. The Problem Proportional allocation comes up often throughout our codebase, but its easiest to explain using a fictional example: Suppose your paychecks are $1000 each, and you always allocate them to your different savings accounts as follows: College savings fund: $310 Buy a car fund: $350 Buy a house fund: $200 Safety net: $140 Now suppose youre an awesome employee and received a bonus of $1234.56. Their office is ok-ish. Sometimes, it's a good idea to think outside the box in order to strike the right balance of test coverage, confidence, and maintainability. And, boy howdy, are there plenty of available frameworks for doing this kind of thing! Because integration tests are more expensive to write and maintain than screen tests, we wanted to make sure the flows we were testing were the most impactful. We still want to maximize our objective function V. However, with the introduction of the drift terms, we want every dollar allocated toward a single fund to incur a penalty if it moves the target balance for that funds asset class below or above its target amount. The messaging that happened for failures when you merged a pull request into master was a little different in that it included mentions for the relevant contributors (maybe all of them, if we were lucky! After considering what we were currently sending our engineers, we realized that 1)contextand 2)statuswere the most important things to communicate, which were the aspects of our old messaging that were suffering the most. In the end, we want to verify the plumbing of user input and business logic output through as few large specs per feature that we can get away with. Now, Betterment customers can turn on TCP in their accounts, and their holdings in multiple investment accounts will be managed as a single portfolio allocation, but rearranged in such a way that the holdings across those accounts seek to maximize the overall portfolios after-tax returns. API boundary tests are even allowed to be duplicative with underlying model specs if the behavior is explicitly important and apparent to the consuming application. The way the final interview was setup made me rave about it to pretty much everyone I knew. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. Asking for someones name is simple, but full of assumptions. Well only be notified if, over 7 days or 30 days or even longer, they exceed the target goal weve defined for our service. AWS KMS doesanchoredencryption right. This is a great way to get a good signal while reducing unnecessary noise. Happy paths are non-exceptional flows (flows not based on bad user state or input). But we did things a little differently, which saved us thousands of computing hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars. If an engineer has a monitor tied to metrics or APM, then they just need to plug in the monitor ID directly into our SLO yaml interface. But take a look at the first onenotice the 100+ lines of (omitted) code. Then George. Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, and iPhone are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. Betterment assumes no responsibility or liability whatsoever for the content, accuracy, reliability or opinions expressed in a third-party website, to which a published article links (a linked website). When I started at Betterment (the company) five years ago, Betterment (the platform) was a monolithic Java application. Most teams need to deploy to multiple environments: production, staging, feature branches, sales demos, etc. Let's imagine a simple social network app, igrastam, that has an activity feed screen, a profile screen, a flow for updating your profile information, and a flow for posting images. In just a few weeks, Betterment is launching an updated portfolio -- one that has been optimized for better expected returns. This rule is applicable for all controller actions and is a critical component of our security story. Betterments engineers decided, therefore, that it was critical to our mission that we be capable of handling each and every contract as reliably as possible. In Spring of 2017, Betterments Diversity & Inclusion Steering Committee partnered with our Engineering Team to bring on two developers with non-traditional backgrounds. Or they can define some SLOs around types of on-call tasks that their team tackles each week. Maintaining a Data Dictionary wiki became a part of our Definition of Done. The only downside of DMS is that we are not aware of how recent source data is in Redshift. What did we need? Asked for feedback after the rejection and didn't get any. Heres a simplified version of our upstart configuration. Jesse Harrelson: I first heard of Betterment by attending the Women Who CodeAlgorithms meetup hosted at HQ. We do this in two ways: with dashboards, and with alerts. 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. As an engineer myself, I was excited to to speak with her after the event about coding, women in tech, and fintech trends. I have been interviewing Software Engineers for over 25 years and in my current role as CEO of Solution Street, I conduct, on average, two interviews a week. Perhaps they can set goals around "Bug Tracker Inbox Zero" or "Failed Background Jobs Zero" within a certain time frame, a week or a month for example. Each project needs a configuration definition file (coach.yml) that declares its project_type. In our updated portfolio, the number of possible transactions types did not change. New York City: $190,000 - $205,000. Our next SHARE Series event features CBS News Business Analyst and CFP professional Jill Schlesinger, as we celebrate her new book, The Dumb Things Smart People Do with Their Money: Thirteen Ways to Right Your Financial Wrongs. To fulfill that promise, we need to deliver the best product and tools available and then improve them indefinitely, which, when you think about it, sounds incredibly ambitious or even foolhardy. 4. It failed for a specific GitHub branch(what-to-say-when-things-fail-branch),ina specific repo(Betterment/coach),for a specific PR(#430),for aspecific job in the test suite (coach_clilint (Gemfile)). Now, I know that my money (well, the money I will hopefully have in the future) ideally should work hard for me instead of just sitting in a savings account. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? Monitors in code Engineers can choose either StatsD or Micrometer to measure complicated experiences with custom metrics, and theres various approaches to turning those metrics directly into monitors within Datadog. Isnt resilience a basic feature of every backend, except maybe the test/development ones? I started reading Robert Shillers Finance and the Good Society, a book my dad recommended to me months earlier. First to make sure the Soup Nazi gets the ratio of ingredients he needs: .40*totalpounds=a1+b1+c1+d1 .12*totalpounds=a2+b2+c2+d2 .08*totalpounds=a3+b3+c3+d3 .15*totalpounds=a4+b4+c4+d4 .15*totalpounds=a5+b5+c5+d5 .05*totalpounds=a6+b6+c6+d6 .05*totalpounds=a7+b7+c7+d7 Then to make sure that the Soup Nazi doesnt buy more pounds of food from one store than he can carry back: a1+a2++a7<=12 b1+b2++b7<=8 c1+c2++c7<=15 d1+d2++d7<=17 We then have to put bounds on all of our variables to say that we cant take more pounds of any ingredient than any store has in stock. Was the error budget consumed by real failures? From 1 to N: Distributed Data Processing with Airflow Betterment has built a highly available data processing platform to power new product features and backend processing needs using Airflow. Colorado: $175,000 - $190,000. 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. Teams without versioning are constantly asking questions like, Did Jim send the latest file?, Can I be sure that my teammate selected all columns when he re-sorted?, or The bottom line numbers are different in this report; what exactly changed since the first draft? These inefficiencies in collaboration and uncertainties about the calculations can be deadly to a data team. the trust root chain. Using a separate CSS manifest with the core changes enumerated above, we felt free to dedicate resources to more thoroughly rebranding our high traffic experiences, deferring improvements to pages that received the initial reskin until after launch. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. For Java apps and libraries we run integration and unit tests by default as well asPMDas part of our static code analysis. How We Develop Design Components in Rails Learn how we use Rails components to keep our code D.R.Y. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? We're always searching for extraordinary people to join our team. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? What would you say has been the most rewarding part of your experience so far? As of July 2016, all full-stack, mobile, and site-reliability engineering roles have adopted this new approach. Interviews at Betterment Experience Positive 47% Negative 34% Neutral 19% Getting an Interview Applied online 74% Recruiter 15% Employee Referral 6% Difficulty 2.8 Average Hard Average Easy Interviews for Top Jobs at Betterment Software Engineer (18) Customer Experience Associate (8) Product Designer (4) Product Manager (4) Betterment has also established a "debt day" where once every month or two, all developers take one day to pay down technical debt, including legacy code. 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. We could have attempted to construct a procedural-style heuristic solution to this, but the complexity of the problem led us to believe this approach would be hard to implement and challenging to maintain. In short, these bugs allow attackers to access data directly using its unique identifiers even if that data belongs to someone else because the application fails to take authorization into account. More generally, how do we take an inflow of money and allocate it to weighted buckets in a fair, penny-precise way? 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. What I mean by fake plugins is really simple. 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. Tip 2: Keep all initialization & configuration code inside of setUp() methods While it may be tempting to set up certain test objects directly in your main function, this can cause sneaky issues to crop up, especially when mocking or using mutable objects. What inspired you to become a civil engineer? We followed up shortly after with apull requestto patch the second issuechange the behavior of the cop to disallow usages ofsafe_concat. The optimization package were using in this example, pythons scipy.optimize, provides a very expressive interface for specifying all of those bounds and constraints. At a high level, a service level objective is a way of measuring the performance of, correctness of, validity of, or efficacy of some component of a service over time by comparing the functionality of specific service level indicators (metrics of some kind) against a target goal. This was essentially a map for us engineers to be able to reference and go update those old usages in our codebase whenever we wanted. This makes the tests run faster, and removes the need for having any special tables that dont get cleaned out. My only criticism would be that since I mainly had experience with Eclipse instead of IntelliJ, we wasted a small amount of time fiddling with the controls. I searched every new term I came across and, when that wasnt enough, asked my co-workers for help. One might say that this is the primary goal of any webappto provide a set of HTTP endpoints that reliably handle all the success and failure cases within a specified amount of time, and that dont topple over under high-traffic conditions. From an engineering perspective, this means we needed to enhance the code in our existing trading platform to accommodate dynamic asset allocation, with an eye towards future enhancements in our pipeline. If we receive a request for a URL we didn't define, it will 404. Where engineers can experience feedback about their code with delight and simplicity. Testing our Rails applications allows us to build features more quickly and confidently by proving that code does what we think it should, catching regression bugs, and serving as documentation for our code. But a scaled engineering org presents other challenges that could just as easily put the goal out of reach. Tell me about yourself Describe a process you fixed. Server Javascript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App. While working, I would take any available time for courses on websites like Codecademy and Team Treehouse. 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. Thankfully, the changes to the Local Authentication framework were done in such a way that we determined there wasnt a security risk, but it did leave a problematic user experience in reaching a potentially-inescapable screen when selecting Dont Allow on the privacy permission prompt. 2. If we merged code into a tracked brancha branch that multiple engineers contribute to, like masterfor one of our biggest repos, which contained 20 apps and 20 test suites, we would be notified at every transition: every rubocop failure, every flakey occurrence of a feature test. First, we want an address model, which we map to our /addresses endpoint. 3. Under the covers, request specs are just a thin wrapper around Rails integration tests. 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. Our Women Who Code meetups become a way to track your progression. One of the things we chatted about after the talk was how empowering it is to have the resources and movements of our generation to bring more diversity to the tech industry. To be more concrete about this, lets define some variables. I applied online. Julia has excellent support for technical computing and mathematical modelling. 2.5 hr final onsite - behavioral (I did not make it here, but recruiter told me schedule beforehand), Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, I applied online. Ultimately, using fake plugins works well and makes this a satisfyingly functional testing solution. Simply put, weve asserted that the sum of the balances of every fund in Joes taxable account must remain at $11,000. Deadnaming is when, intentionally or not, you refer to a trans person by the name they used before transitioning. The interview was centered around how well you communicate,work with others, and problem solve. 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. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2021. I got a very upbeat and cheery sounding email to schedule the call, and my heart was pounding as I waited, and then I was met with a rejection. (Besides, no one wants to be an adult, right?) 17.0availableacrossallstores. We can also set a warning threshold if we want to be notified earlier when were using up our error budget. The Other Side of the Launch As the big day arrived, we enjoyed a smooth rebrand launch thanks to the thoughtful implementation of our existing tools and techniques. For a problem space as large as ours, we cant fulfill that promise with a singletwo pizza team. Lets start out by exploring that robot testing technique I mentioned earlier. To test our algorithms-as-strategies, we simulated the thousands of potential futures they might encounter. The other separation we wanted to make was between the screen interactions and the tests themselves. A software engineer needs to be multilingual. 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. There, we have built in automated testing that resolves the version of the package that is being tested, looks up any reverse dependencies of that package, resolves the compatibility bounds of those packages to see if the newly registered version could lead to a breaking change, and if so, runs the full test suites of the reverse dependencies. How to remove legacy code During our portfolio optimization, we had to come up with a framework for dealing with pieces of old code. I got a very upbeat and cheery sounding email to schedule the call, and my heart was pounding as I waited, and then I was met with a rejection. 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. Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, I applied online. 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 . It must be precise and clear where you got your data, and I dont mean conversationally clear. We didnt want to store the JSON in a MySQL database, because managing it would be unnecessary overhead for this purpose. Well, when building web applications, we (as web application developers) strive to build pages that respond quickly and reliably to web requests. Technical interview (computer science fundamentals), Technical interview (modelling and app design), Ask the candidate to describe a recent technical challenge in detail, Introduce the pair programming problem and explore the problem, Pair programming (optional, time permitting). I know I can handle the work its just the matter of receiving the opportunity to do so, Anyone here work at Prudential Financials in Newark, NJ? assuming a secret-editor role The sops command will open and decrypt the secrets in their editor and, if changed, encrypt them and save them back to the files original location. Using UJS patterns, our view can live completely on the server. Rule #2: Controllers should pass ActiveRecord models, rather than ids, into the model layer. There were task forces cobbled together to drive up reliability of the test suite, to stamp out flakes, to rewrite, and to refactor. 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.

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