betterment software engineer interview

This resulted in app code (the content-specific code) becoming entangled with system (the base HTML) code. While the nascency of Julia as a language means that the community and ecosystem is much smaller than those of other languages, we found that the code and community oversamples on the type of libraries that we care about. To avoid time-consuming manual processes, and the human error typical of that approach, analytics has become a programming discipline. Jesse Harrelson: Coding became a hobby for me when I would make websites for my bands in Nashville, but after meeting up with more and more people in tech in the city, I knew it was something I wanted to do as a career. Back in the Day Heres how our interview process once looked: Resum review Initial phone screen Technical phone screen Onsite: Day 1 Technical interview (computer science fundamentals) Technical interview (modelling and app design) Hiring manager interview Onsite: Day 2 Product and design interview Company founder interview Company executive interview While this process helped in growing our engineering team, it began showing some cracks along the way. Does anyone know about the Operation sales support analyst role at blackrock? Interviewers were professional throughout. 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. Maintained and open-sourced by Mozilla, sops is a command line utility written in Go that facilitates slick encryption and decryption workflows by using your terminals default editor. Engineering Background RetireGuide started its journey as a set of functions written in the R programming language, which Betterments investment analytics team uses extensively for internal research. Any questions for me? Note that the contribution limits mentioned in this example are as of the time this article was published. What I mean by fake plugins is really simple. Our Principles in Action: Standardizing the Interface At Betterment, we want to empower our engineers to do their best work. The most significant engineering challenge in building RetireGuide was turning a complex, research-driven financial model into a personalized Web application. Interview questions for Junior Software Engineer will help you succeed in your interview. In Betterments mobile apps, this means including trustworthy but convenient local authentication options for resuming active login sessions. That usually means that they end up being pretty slow and they tend to be somewhat flaky. De-scoping with a Lightweight Reskin To rebrand hundreds of pages in time, we had to iron out the precise requirements of what it meant for our views to be on brand. Each consists of some action being taken for / by / on behalf of / in the interest of one or more of our customers, and that must be completed within an appropriate amount of time. This meant when the designs were changed, we needed to find all of the places this code was used to update it. By default, sopsorific wants to be configured with a production (sensitive zone) secrets file and a default (non-sensitive zone) secrets file. 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)). The CLI reads a small project-level configuration definition file (coach.yml) located in a projects directory and extrapolates information to create the much larger repo-level CircleCI specific configuration file (.circleci/config.yml), which we were previously editing ourselves. As we've grown, we've had to push at the limits of what a database-backed queue can accomplish. We wanted to have a test harness that we could use to set up the app under test and the world that the app would run in, however we knew this configuration code would be mildly complicated and something that would be in flux. 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. Rane Johnson - I met Rane at the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing in 2011, and then again when I interned at Microsoft in 2012. Well only be notified if, over 7 days or 30 days or even longer, they exceed the target goal weve defined for our service. More critically, the one-off script solution wasnt stored in source control, therefore it wasnt tested. 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. the trust root chain. Meet Joe Joe is a hypothetical Betterment customer. 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. Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. 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. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. Inform the roadmap Within three weeks of operations, it became clear that we could use turn-around time metrics from ad-hoc or advisory requests to inform us where we need to invest in project cycles and technology. While an interview setting may not offer pair programming in its purest sense, our interviewers truly participate in the process of writing software with the candidates. Developers can also run these validations locally: sopsorific check Deployment The application server is configured with the instance profile generated by sopsorific so that it can assume the IAM role that it needs to decrypt the secrets at runtime. A bonus of Style Closet is how well its able to host these React components since they can simply be incorporated into a view by being wrapped in a Style Closet component. Tell me about a time you collaborated at work. 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. How did you overcome that feeling? 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. On the alerting side, we have DataDog monitors in place for overall queue statistics, like max age SLA violations, so that we can alert and page ourselves when queues arent working off jobs quickly enough. Similarly, the sum of the balances of every fund in his Roth IRA must remain at $5,500. Also, the flutter_driver API worked differently than the screen testing API and was generally more difficult to use. While migrating from Luigi to Airflow is not yet complete, Airflow has already offered us a solid foundation. These arent necessarily true-to-form SLOs but engineers can use this framework and tooling provided to collect data around how their systems are operating and have conversations on prioritization based on what they discover, beginning to build a culture of observability and accountability Conclusion Betterment is at a point in its growth where prioritization has become more difficult and more important. Photo credit: Christine Meintjes Abi: Can you speak about a time in your life where impostor syndrome was limiting in your own career? So even if your queue lives in an entirely separate datastore, it can be effectively coupled to your DB's IOPS and CPU limitations. Here was a company that wasnt solely focused on the traditional Computer Science education when hiring an apprentice/junior engineer. provided they know or can guess its ID - not great! 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. chicken:5.000lbs(5.0instock) carrots:0.000lbs(1.0instock) thyme:0.000lbs(3.0instock) onions:0.699lbs(6.0instock) noodles:1.000lbs(5.0instock) garlic:1.565lbs(2.0instock) parsley:1.565lbs(3.0instock) 7.582lbsoffoodfromGeorge's. Cassidy Williams, Venmo engineer, said impostor syndrome tends to be more common in high-achieving women. How is pay, wlb & work culture. Were continually evaluating whether to adopt this process for other roles, as well. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. This is why we adoptedDockerto run a production-like Airflow cluster from the ground up on our development machines. If the service doesnt work as intended, no user (or engineer) will be happy. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. Lets add them to our objective function: is the dollar amount above the target balance in asset class AC. In addition, weve consistently received high marks from candidates and interviewers alike, who prefer our revamped approach. We knew that a star schema approach would help us clarify a data narrative and give all of us a consistent view of truth. Lets define that objective function. I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. (Besides, no one wants to be an adult, right?) At deploy time, the Coach web-app consumes these files and idempotently create Datadog monitors, which can be used as SLIs (service level indicators) to inform SLOs, or as standalone alerts that need immediate triage every time they're triggered. Flutter provides good solutions for both screen testing and UI testing, but what about the middle-ground? In system specs, each test is wrapped in a database transaction because its run within a Rails process, which means we dont need to use the DatabaseCleaner gem anymore. This did two things: it took testing off the developers plates early in the process, allowing them to focus on writing production code, and also helped isolate the central objects that required most of their attention. Were always iterating on our solutions, so if youre interested in expanding on or solving these types of problems with us, check out ourcareer page! I interviewed at Betterment. We want them to be able to work without an internet connection, and if we do want to integrate with a real service in local development, we should be able to do thatmeaning we should be able to test and integrate locally at will, without having to rely on cumbersome, extra-connected services (think Docker, Kubernetes; anything that pairs cloud features with the local environment.) We store fake responses with a URI template, a status code, and a body. By having these changes in version control, each addition to the CI pipeline goes through code review and requires tests be written. We repeated multiple styles and page elements throughout the app to make the experience consistent, but we didnt have a great way to reuse the common elements. All the info I provided is given to you at the time of the interview. Soon we were solving for our acceptance criteria requirements left and rightthat Java app needs the PMD linter! Engineers' productivity and happiness decrease as even the smallest tasks can be frustrating and time-consuming. Looking for the best java software engineer interview questions to ask candidates during your hiring process? 30 min Q & A with head of recruiting - you ask questions, recruiter asks questions A Redis-based queue will still introduce DB pressure if its jobs execute anything involving ActiveRecord models, and solutions must exist to throttle or rate limit these jobs. Then a light came on. For example, thecharacter is escaped using>, and the&character is escaped using&. Questions were in JavaScript, ruby on rails, and React having to implement specific features into a pre developed app. Ultimately, using fake plugins works well and makes this a satisfyingly functional testing solution. When we found that Rubocops OutputSafety check had some holes, we plugged them. At a high level, these cops track user input (via params.permit et al.) 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). Here's how they did it. Ideally, the same tools you build to understand your data when youre at 10 employees should scale and evolve through your IPO. How likely is it that youll spot a copy-paste error at row 403,658? To do good data work today, you need to use a system that is reproducible, versionable, scalable, and open. In Spring of 2017, Betterments Diversity & Inclusion Steering Committee partnered with our Engineering Team to bring on two developers with non-traditional backgrounds. Secured rank among top 15 in letsgrowmore summer of code, won first place in Diversion 2022, among top 3 mentors in . Now, a year later, Im working on a tool to check for money launderers and fraudsters. Theres such a wide spectrum of secrets management implementations out there ranging from powerful solutions that require a significant amount of operational overhead, likeHashicorp Vault, to solutions that require little to no operational overhead, like a.env file. In practice, deciding on a job queue is more complicated than that. Before my internship, finance, to me, was a field in which some of my peers would work more hours than I had hours of consciousness. Everyone was very open about what they thought about the company and about what their experience at the company was like. 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. Pound of food limits Elaines 12 Georges 8 Jerrys 15 Newmans 17 With the optimizer, the function that we are trying to minimize or maximize is called the objective function. Isolating New Code with ActionPack Variants ActionPack variantsprovide an elegant solution to rolling out significant front end changes. Given these reasons, Julia is the perfect language to serve as a solution to the two-language problem. At first, I thought my lack of exposure to finance put me at a disadvantage. They're an answer to the question "how can we approximate end-to-end tests for a fraction of the cost?" 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! 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 trust root chain. Failure to do so could mean anything from creating a minor inconvenience to blocking trades from executing. Weve written a few useful helpers that allow us to easily plug in our new server-driven style into our existing Marionette application. alias prod-encrypt="pbpaste | ansible-vault encrypt_string --vault-password-file=~/ansible-vault/production.key" This wasnt the worst setup, but didnt scale well as we grew. One system spec that asserts the happy path will be sufficient for most features. 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. Before working at Betterment, I didnt think finance was relevant to me. This rule speaks to the broader goal of authorization being obvious in our code. Our hiring managers now report that they have a much clearer understanding of what each candidate brings to the table. 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. Enqueues and Transactions See, theres a major gotcha that may not be obvious from the list of ActiveJob backends. Additionally, in CircleCI where we can easily parallelize our test suites, we realized we wouldnt want to notify someone for every chunk of the test suite that failed, just the first time a failure happened for the suite. Coach will send us a message when that date rolls around to encourage us to take a deeper look at our measurements and possibly reevaluate our goals around measuring this part of our service. Really good! Requirements for Modern Data Analysis Spreadsheets fundamentally lack these properties essential to modern data work. 3. 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. Ill just use Betterment. This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. Without getting into the gory details, this essentially requires us, for every test we write, to stub a request for user datawith differences across minor things like ID values, we cant share these stubs between tests. The gem includes a tiny Julia project with the API library as its only dependency. By doing this, we can ensure that when we release a patch or minor version of one of our packages, we can ensure that it wont break any packages that depend on it at registration time. Those interviewers dont fill out a scorecard, and our hiring managers are forbidden from discussing candidates with them. Theres so many things I would love to list here. Now, updating CI requires opening a PR to make the change. Therefore our objective function becomes, a1a2a3a4d6d7 And expressing that with numpy is pretty painless: numpy.sum(x)*1.0 Bounds Bounds make sure that we dont take more than any one ingredient than the store has in stock. Senior Executive - Software Engineer. So the string option was appealing to us, but that workflow didnt have the best editing experience as it required multiple steps in order to encrypt a value, insert it into the correct file, and then export it into the environment like the12-factor appmethodology tells us we should. 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. We use cutting-edge technology to build cutting-edge technology. The server is responsible for knowing about (1) our data, (2) how to wrap that data into rich domain models that own our business logic, (3) how to render those models into views, and (4) how to render those views on the page. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jun 2019. Lets talk about why you chose Betterment. Interested in engineering at Betterment? To accomplish this, we need to define new decision variables. Commercial Customer Service Representative. The structure of a Web app is a lot more complex than what the user sees on the page. Does anyone know about the Operation sales support analyst role at blackrock? We turned toAirflowbecause it has emerged as a full-featured workflow management framework better suited to orchestrate frequent tasks throughout the day. Lets say weve defined some SLOs and notice they are falling behind over time. Server JavaScript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App Betterment engineers recently migrated a single-page backbone app to a server-driven Rails experience. They had a few questions for me at the end and whiles i was talking they cut me off and said "bye" and just ended the call. But data alone is not enoughwe needed the right storytellers. We also maintain two other dashboards in our cloud monitoring service, DataDog. As good companies tend to do, it began growingnot just in terms of users, but in terms of capabilities. 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. And this bounty of information helps a lot if the engineer has multiple PRs open and needs to quickly switch context. Overall, I got the impression their interview process is very focused on cultural fit and enthusiasm for the product more than anything else. While we encourage candidates to ask questions of everyone they meet, the AMA provides an opportunity to meet with a Betterment engineer who has zero input on whether or not to hire them. All of the above! 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.

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