betterment software engineer interview

In order to fulfill two of our main requirements: being able to run as part of our normal test suite in CI and having a familiar API, we knew wed need to build our framework on top of flutters existing screen test framework. 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. Thirdly, we want to be able to autoload our fakes. In short, our devs needed to be able to run individual services in isolation; by default they were set to communicate with one another, meaning an engineer would have to run all of the services locally in order to work on any one service. Before we built TCP, Betterment customers had each account managed as a separate, standalone portfolio. Rather than getting together to hear presentations, meetups are designed to have a group-led dynamic. We can be confident that the right people are notified at the right time because we wrote code that does that and we tested it. Were excited that organizations are already reaching out to collaborate, Emily said. They get the best of both worlds while we look to what comes next Finally, transition is prioritized in-stream with the needs of the organization and we never bite off more than we can chew. Those three principles are: Authorization through Impossibility Authorization through Navigability Authorization through Application Boundaries This post will explore the first two principles and provide examples of common patterns that can lead to vulnerabilities as well as guidance for how to fix them. Lets talk about why you chose Betterment. Cleaning, Reshaping, Summarizing Every dataset includes some amount of errant, corrupted, or outlying observations. Timeline Another change is that the entire onsite interview is completed in a single day. Then, we configure our init system, upstart, to execute the process wrapped in the sopsorific run command. Educate everyone, not just women and minorities: When everyone is aware and discussing inclusion in the workplace, it builds and maintains a great company culture. Consistency is key, said Jesse. It might take some time to convince the rest of your organization to receive reports in these more modern formats. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. Our goal was to replace the old way of building and testing our applications (what we called the Old World) and start fresh with these principles in mind (what we deemed the New World). 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. Form small groups: People are more open to talking closely with smaller groups than a large discussion roundtable. Questions were in JavaScript, ruby on rails, and React having to implement specific features into a pre developed app. End-to-end-ish tests using fake HTTP in Flutter We write tests in order to prove our features work as intended and we run those tests consistently to prove that our features don't stop working as intended. More precisely, when we make use of database transactions (which, when we use ActiveRecord, we assuredly do whether we realize it or not), a database-backed queue will ensure that enqueued jobs will either commit or roll back with the rest of our ActiveRecord-based changes. Answer Example: "As a junior software engineer, I believe the most . Interviewer was very friendly and was trying to know about your personality more than any work experience you may have. 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. Interested in engineering at Betterment? How is pay, wlb & work culture. Instead of four analysts all inventing their own method for loading and cleaning a table of users, you can share as a group the utils/LoadUsers() function and ensure you are talking about the same people at every meeting. Betterment interview details in New York City, NY: 37 interview questions and 35 interview reviews posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. straightforward interview process, the Betterment apprenticeship quickly . Cross-Database Replication withDMS We used Luigi to extract and load source data from multiple internal databases into ourRedshiftdata warehouse on an ongoing basis. In other words, what purpose do these background jobs serve? Betterment is an engineering-driven company that has developed the most-trusted online financial advisor based on the principles of optimization and efficiency. As a result, we had to build features into sopsorific to allow vendor provided secrets that didnt meet the sopsorific standards by default to be accepted by sopsorifics checks. Given requirements, explain how one may model some data. Additionally, request specs are much more realistic than controller specs since they actually exercise the full request / response lifecycle routing, middleware, etc whereas controller specs circumvent much of that process. This forces extra thought and extra conversation in code review to ensure that the usage is in fact safe. As demonstrated, Rails provides some methods that mark content as safe without escaping it for us. These hard-working and talented individuals spend a large portion of their time developing models, researching new investment ideas and maintaining our research libraries. Lets call it resilience. Onsite they give you a mock project where you have to complete the requirements. Have we violated our error budget every month for the past three months? Request specs for APIs are owned by the consuming apps team to ensure that the invariants that they expect to hold are not broken. A Ruby class (the behavior aside from any JavaScript): the class holds the props the component allows to be passed in as well as any methods needed for the view, similar to a presenter model. If, for example, our user research says we should aim for 99.5% uptime, thats 3h 21m 36s of downtime available per 28 days. Wed shrink the expected results we got from production, then re-inflate and compare them to what our tests produced. tags: - team:sre thresholds: - target: 99.5 timeframe: 30d warning_target: 99.99 monitor_ids: - 30842606 The interface supports metrics directly as well (mirroring Datadogs SLO types) so an engineer can reference any metric directly in their SLO definition, as seen here: # availability - last_updated_date: "2021-02-16" approval_date: "2021-03-02" next_revisit_date: "2021-03-15" category: availability tags: - team:sre thresholds: - target: 99.9 timeframe: 30d warning_target: 99.99 type: metric description: 99.9% of manual deploys will complete successfully over a 30day period. If youre interested in hearing me say even more about resilient data persistence and job execution, feel free to check out Can I break this?, a talk I gave at RailsConf 2021! Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. 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. 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. Heres a simplified version of our upstart configuration. 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. The right hand side of the equation is assumed to be zero. 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. Longer answer: Here at Betterment, we use both. In addition, we knew that as our work on TCP progressed, we were going to need to iterate on our mathematical model. 2 hr ByteBoard interview - 40 min design and algorithms (know your standard data structures and algorithms), 70 mins implementing some methods What are the principles that your team share? 12.0availableacrossallstores. To process registration events, we maintain a registry server on an EC2 instance provisioned throughTerraform, so updates to the configuration are as easy as running a single `terraform apply` command. By the way, this is a topic I could talk about endlessly, so Ill leave it there for now. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. The result would let us offer a permanent home for our retirement advice that would be always on for our end customers. You see, a background job essentially represents a tiny contract. Given those requirements, we took a step back to make a few overarching design decisions. Each project needs a configuration definition file (coach.yml) that declares its project_type. This leads to less test setup and fewer tests per model to establish confidence that the code is behaving as expected. I interviewed at Betterment. 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. Sharing code in a common environment also enables the reuse of modular analysis components. Its all about the customer This is where the philosophy of defining and keeping track of SLOs comes into play. Use SQLite database to be efficient The best way to store the user transaction objects was to use JSON, a human-readable representation of Java objects. 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. IMHO, Betterment hiring process is best in the business. This includes validations, instance and class method inputs and outputs, Active Record callbacks, and other model behaviors. 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. Accessing the database requires knowledge of SQL, a lot of scripts are written in Python, front end structure and design is written in HTML and CSS, and front end animation is written in javascript. I started reading Robert Shillers Finance and the Good Society, a book my dad recommended to me months earlier. On Fishbowl, you can share insights and advice anonymously with Betterment employees and get real answers from people on the inside. Straightforward tests are easy to write, read, and maintain. 15.00% 6.000lbsofnoodles. 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. And then youll probably want to expose a way for Ruby to instruct Julia to clean up that reference (i.e. For this reason, if you do write characterization tests, we recommend not going too far with them. I switch between 80s music, Broadway show tunes, Christian music, and classical music. 10 Common job interview questions for Civil Engineer. (By_Hasan Sir) Easy right? Now that weve wrangled our CI process and encoded the best practices into a tool, were ready to tackle our Continuous Deployment pipeline. Eventually, we could explore ways of feeding jobs through to higher performance queues downstream, far away from the database-backed workers. If you remember nothing else, remember this. Optimal portfolio management requires managing a portfolio in real-time, including taxes, rebalancing, risk, and circumstantial variables like cashflows. There's a human conversation and negotiation to be had about these contracts, and you can fool yourself into thinking you don't need to have that conversation if you've got a file that guarantees that you and your collaborator service are speaking the same language; you may be speaking the same words, but you might not infer the same meaning. A Guide to the Software Engineer Interview Process - Indeed In our experience, it has always taken longer than expected. If youre the first convert, absolutism is probably not the right approach. The friendly atmosphere at Betterment and the helpfulness of the people here nurtured my nascent understanding of finance and turned me into someone who is passionate about investing. However, to complete this integration, we needed to migrate the entire advice tool from our R codebase into the Betterment Web application ecosystem. The content on this page is reflective of a specific point in time (as of the publication date). Meanwhile, if our queue existed in a separate datastore, our enqueues will be completely unaware of the transaction, and wed run the risk of enqueuing a job that acts on data that was never committed, or (even worse) wed fail to enqueue a job even when the rest of the transactional data was committed. To be more concrete about this, lets define some variables. However, you asked for themostrewarding, and I would have to say without a doubtthe mentorship. Centralizing architectural decision-making would kill ownership and autonomy, and ensure your best people leave or never join in the first place. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? Simple. 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. I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. Pair programming to design an application together, Work experience and projects from my portfolio. Non-CPU intensive tasks (e.g. For more information about working at Betterment, please visit our Careers page. We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. 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. If youre significantly exercising behavior not in the layer youre writing a test for, you might be putting the test in the wrong place. I have always been interested in technology. There are repos, each repo has one or more projects of any type. I interviewed at Betterment. For his recipe he needs a ratio of: 40% chicken 12% carrots 8% thyme 15% onions 15% noodles 5% garlic 5% parsley All of the stores around him only keep limited amounts in stock. Depends on my feelings about the problem I'm working on. Everyone was really nice and thoughtful and genuinely wanted to know about me. Tour of the office + on-site pair programming after successful take home. Below is a model spec skeleton with some common test cases: System Specs System specs are like integration tests. Those are stored in a file named .coach/datadog_monitors.yml and look like this: monitors: - type: metric metric: "coach.ci_notification_sent.completed.95percentile" name: "coach.ci_notification_sent.completed.95percentile SLO" aggregate: max owner: sre alert_time_aggr: on_average alert_period: last_5m alert_comparison: above alert_threshold: 5500 - type: apm name: "Pull Requests API endpoint violating SLO" resource_name: api::v1::pullrequestscontroller_show max_response_time: 900ms service_name: coach page: false slack: false It wasnt simple to make this abstraction intuitive between a Datadog monitor configuration and a user interface. When before it could take days or weeks to add a new step to a CI pipeline, now it takes hours of simple code review. 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. 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. - last_updated_date: "2021-02-18" approval_date: "2021-03-02" next_revisit_date: "2021-03-15" category: latency type: monitor description: This SLO covers latency for our CI notifications system - whether it's the github context updates on your PRs or the slack notifications you receive. From a high level view I essentially split this large engineering lift into two different streams of work. Be the first to find this interview helpful, Get started with your Free Employer Profile. 3) 6 hour onsite. 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). We talked about my career and what I was looking for. Well-tested code stored in version control that could easily be changed and developed. Doing so introduces errors, breaks the link between claims and process, and generates huge amounts of work in the inevitable event of revisions. 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. The code in this package is the glue between our pure Julia functions and the lower level library interfaceits responsible for defining the functions that will be exported by the shared library and doing any necessary conversions on input/output. Develop a process where your code organizes and saves these variants rather than discarding the ones that didnt work. We write our tests, called specs (short for specification) with RSpec and Capybara. Building new products can often be done using our existing engineering abstractions. Building on at-least-once guarantees If we know for sure that well fully execute all jobs at least once, then we can write our jobs in such a way that makes the at-least-once approach reliable and resilient to failure. Lots of STAR method and cultural fit questions. Cleaning up the most looked at metrics helped the organization speak to and understand key data in a consistent manner. This made our results robust to the risk of solely optimizing for the past, a common error in the analysis of strategies. Too tough to call. We provide a class that exposes the developer-friendly configuration API for fake responses, and we implement the HttpClientAdapter interface provided by dio. At a high level, the Coach CLI generates a lot of yaml files that are used in all sorts of places to help manage operational complexity and cloud resources for consumer-facing web-apps. Ask Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two Harvard economists who published an influential paper on sovereign debt and economic growth, only to find out that the results rested in part on the accidental omission of five cells from an average. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? Microsoft question - Design an old style mobile phone and search for various names based on key press. This is a rails specific interview, where you get a rails app and you go through it fixing and creating features. As of July 2016, all full-stack, mobile, and site-reliability engineering roles have adopted this new approach. During testing, we often ran into scenarios where our model had no feasible solutionusually due to a bug we had introduced. The phenomenon, Williams said, is something that she has seen particularly among high-achieving womenwhere self-doubt becomes an obstacle for professional development. Modeling and implementing our portfolio management algorithms using linear programming was not easy, but it ultimately resulted in the simplest possible system needed to reliably pursue optimal after-tax returns. Ensure the same set of acceptance criteria is in place for all codebases in the org. Three Things I Learned In My Engineering Internship I knew I had a lot to learn about how a Web app works, but I never imagined that it involved as much as it does. Finally, these tests effectiveness is directly related to how we can apply them to reality, so we need to be simplewe want to be able to test and build features without connections to other features. We wrote a controller-level hook to update the variant and render the new layout files, reskinning thepackage. This manual testing was tedious and time consuming for engineers, whose time is expensive. Fidel Severino: Im originally from the Dominican Republic and moved to the United States at age 15. We had no idea when it failed or missed tagging some contributors. Alternatively, if you want to actually pass complex objects out, youll have to ensure Julia holds a reference to the objects beyond the life of the function, in order to keep them from being garbage collected. Hopefully its easy to look past the trivial nature of using an intand imagine how this might apply to a more complex test case. For more information about working at Betterment, please visit our Careers page. Failed after the onsite interview because apparently my tech skills weren't "up to par." But in the Old World there wasnt enough context to make the message immediately useful. It wasnt enough. Asking questions, definitely. Our principles derive from and are matched to Betterments collective experience and context. Because this was entry level, experience with specific languages were not required and interviewers were very helpful with syntax as long as you knew what steps were needed to solve the problem. We valued the ability to encrypt just the secret values themselves and leave the variable name in plain-text. That's what we do here at Betterment, come join us! Our reliance on background jobs even allows us to guarantee the eventual consistency of our distributed systems, but more on that later. Finding a Middle Ground Between Screen and UI Testing in Flutter We outline the struggles we had testing our flutter app, our approaches to those challenges, and the solutions we arrived at to solve those problems. It's a class with a route defined for each URL we care about faking. Because we use CircleCI for our CI pipelines, we knew we would have to define our workflows using their DSL inside a.circleci/config.ymlfile at the root of a projects repository. Fortunately, variants made removing legacy code quite straightforward. How it works now Now that we knowwhocan do what, lets talk abouthow they can do what they can do. A component is a reusable code building block. The optimization package were using in this example, pythons scipy.optimize, provides a very expressive interface for specifying all of those bounds and constraints. Their office is ok-ish. Specifically, we set up a new database server dedicated to reporting and ad-hoc workloads. If you have influence in the hiring process, try to push for candidates who understand and respect these principles of data science. 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. Like all of our tests, this functions both as regression prevention and as documentation of your intent. We used to use controller specs instead of request specs. Recruiter was great in connecting me with more engineers and managers to get more insight onto the role and culture. If we were to inject user-provided content onto a page without escaping it, wed be vulnerable to executing malicious code in the users browser, allowing an attacker full control over a customers session.This resourceis helpful to learn more about XSS. If its a reasonable addition to CI, our thought is that everyone should benefit. But I really liked how "organic" these problems were since I got a sense of the actual challenges I would be facing as well as the tools and practices used by the team. Using this declarative configuration is more extensible and more user friendly and doesnt break the contract weve put in place for projects that use our CI platform. Though our contract with projects of different types is standardized, we permit some level of customization. Changing the objective function and adding new constraints needed to be easy to do. Well go into contributing to our platform in more detail below. 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. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. 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. And no one needs to manually edit the.circleci/config.ymlfile again. Process consisted of a phone screening with a recruiter, online tech assessment, and 2 video call interviews. It isnt that much of a stretch to claim that an engineers level of happiness does have some effect on the level of service theyre capable of providing a Betterment customer! I was one of those kids who broke their toys in order to find out how they worked. We wrote tests around the methods in question. Google question - Design an access card system. Step 2: 2-3 hour pair programming technical round in an IDE. Women Who Code: An Engineering Q&A with Venmo, How We Built Betterment's Retirement Planning Tool in R and JavaScript, Meet Blazer: A New Open-Source Project from Betterment (video), Dealing With the Uncertainty of Legacy Code, One Massive Monte Carlo, One Very Efficient Solution, Engineering the Trading Platform: Inside Betterments Portfolio Optimization, Three Things I Learned In My Engineering Internship. With our new Tax Coordination feature, were continuing the mission to help our customers portfolios become as tax efficient as possible. As a result, in addition to learning how well a candidate can write code, we learn how well they collaborate. Any insights would be helpful. Further, because all three schemas live in the same MySQL server, client_analytics becomes a central hub from which our colleagues can join tables that have not yet been modeled in the warehouse with key dimensions that have been.

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