betterment software engineer interview

This is a rails specific interview, where you get a rails app and you go through it fixing and creating features. Any error budget we set should account for our fiduciary responsibilities, and should guarantee that we do not cause an irresponsible impact to our customers. 4.5 hr virutal onsite - three 45 min tech interviews with 15 - 30 min breaks. When I returned to the United States, I worked in the retail sector for a few years. Software engineering interviews, like other technical interviews, require plenty of preparation. Allow folks outside of the SRE team to contribute to CI. In planning out integration testing, we had a few key requirements for our integration testing suite: Easily runnable in CI upon each commit An API that would be familiar to developers who are used to writing flutter screen tests The ability to test the integration between features within the system without needing to set up the entire app. We would receive immediate feedback in the CircleCI interface when those jobs ran, and this feedback loop helped us iterate even faster. For our Ruby on Rails apps, that looks like this: sopsorific run 'bundle exec rails c' What did we learn? There is no /api/socialsecuritynumbers endpoint because it is a prime target for third-party abuse and developer error. As a fellow software engineer, I can personally attest to experiencing this phenomenon in tech, but Ive also heard from friends and colleagues that it can be present in non-technical backgrounds, as well. Development Engineers have permissions to assume the secret-editor role for the security zones they have access to. This is the second part of a series of posts about our new CI/CD platform,Coach. Knowing this, we decided to focus on happy paths of flows. No existing library allows us to integrate this way and map HTTP requests to in-process fakes for integration and development. Fortunately, Airflow already maintains a wide selection ofhooksto work with remote sources such as S3. The view (the structure): a familiar html.erb file that looks very similar to what would exist without a component but a little more flexible since it doesnt have its content hard coded in. 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. To get the most out of a programmatic data analysis workflow, it should be truly end-to-end, or as close as you can get in your environment. This would be accomplished through the use of dashboards displayed on TV screens inside the office. Therefore, the cop should hold the same opinions aboutsafe_concatas it does about the other two methods. High quality code. NDA signed. After some time, we found ourselves with an application that had a lot of complexity and splintered code practices throughout. Each would ask same question , only rephrased. We use Coach CLI driven yaml files to support metric or APM monitor types directly in the code base. 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. Yet busy with data projects we were feeling the pain ourselves. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. Lets consider a hypothetical customer account example. In the case of mono-repos, if an app in that repository shouldnt have its secrets visible to all engineers who work in that repository, then the app belongs in a different repository. While this approach enabled us to reuse our existing R code, it also introduced lag and server performance concerns. These are some of the most popular tools in each language organized by their layer in your full-stack analysis workflow: Full Stack Analysis R Python Environment RStudio iPython / Jupyter, PyCharm Sourcing Data RMySQL, rpostgresql, rvest, RCurl, httr MySQLdb,requests, bs4 Cleaning, Reshaping and Summarizing data.table, dplyr pandas Analysis, Model Building, Learning see CRAN Task Views NumPy, SciPy, Statsmodels, Scikit-learn Visualization ggplot2, ggvis, rCharts matplotlib, d3py, Bokeh Reporting RMarkdown, knitr, shiny, rpubs IPython notebook Sourcing Data If there is any ambiguity in this step, the whole analysis stack can collapse on the foundation. iOS had a larger unit testing suite than android did, but neither had integration tests. To do this, I used a tool built by our own Betterment engineer, Nathan, called Uncruft, which not only gave engineers a warning whenever they tried to use the old #first_name method but also created a list of all the places in our code where we were currently using that old method. HR screen followed by a technical phone screen and final round. Many of them took the time to draw diagrams and timelines to accompany their explanations. Request specs for APIs are owned by the consuming apps team to ensure that the invariants that they expect to hold are not broken. Some ecosystems are ephemeral and some are durable, but there is only one true production ecosystem holding sensitive PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and that ecosystem must be held to a higher standard of access control than all others. 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. This type of bug is typically referred to as an Insecure Direct Object Reference vulnerability. Senior Executive - Software Engineer. As good companies tend to do, it began growingnot just in terms of users, but in terms of capabilities. Server app for the TestTrack multi-platform split-testing and feature-gating system. Enter the SHARE (Support, Hire, Aspire, Relate, Empower) Series. In the final Capstone Project, you'll apply your skills to analyze data collected from a real-world (social) network. A Functional Approach to Penny-Precise Allocation How we solved the problem allocating a sum of money proportionally across multiple buckets by leaning on functional programming. It's better to ask a question and move forward with your problem than it is to struggle over an answer. That means the next step was to build a killer testing framework. We valued the ability to encrypt just the secret values themselves and leave the variable name in plain-text. It took eight hours a day of working on a personal finance product for me to notice that the iceberg was even there. The process took 2 days. The structure of a Web app is a lot more complex than what the user sees on the page. But a scaled engineering org presents other challenges that could just as easily put the goal out of reach. Supporting Face ID on the iPhone X We look at how Betterment's mobile engineering team developed Face ID for the latest phones, like iPhone X. 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. Given the formulaic patterns of these bugs, we decided static analysis would be a worthwhile endeavor. Finally, flutter_driver is not built to run a suite of tests or to run easily in CI. Find contacts: direct phone number, email address, work experience. Development on these is concurrent, sometimes impacting global objects and schemas, and it was essential to insulate the team working on core trading functionality from all other development being done at the company. In our case, via background jobs. Women Who Code: An Engineering Q&A with Venmo Betterment recently hosted a Women in Tech meetup with Venmo developer Cassidy Williams, who spoke about impostor syndrome. Therefore, we can calculate our bounds with, defcalc_bounds(): bounds=[] forsinstores: foriiningredients: bounds.append((0,store_inventory[s][i])) returnbounds Guess Providing a good initial guess can go a long way in getting you to a desirable solution. After this process, I am a fan of Betterment. It also gave me a good view on what's day to day work is like. Take a look at our currently open roles. Were able to write tests specific to the component without worrying about the use-case or increasing testing time for our apps. This new flexible set of asset allocations significantly affects our current trading processes. Were running Airflows database on AmazonsRelational Database Serviceand using AmazonsElasticachefor Redis queuing. Step 2: 2-3 hour pair programming technical round in an IDE. First there was an online assessment by ByteBoard. We recently re-optimized our portfolio to include more complex asset allocations and risk models (and it will soon be available). Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. SLOs should align with business objectives and needs, which will help Product and Engineering Managers understand the direct business impact of engineering efforts. 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. Building and maintaining the worlds largest independent robo-advisor requires a world-class team of human engineers. If youve read this far, wed encourage you to take the leap and test out the delayed gem for yourself! 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. Model specs have a live database connection, but we like to think of our model specs as unit tests. From an applications perspective, this relationship between a biometric scanner and the Secure Enclave is simplified to a boolean response. If you don't know Ruby + rails, don't bother since it's the only language you're allowed to work with. Here's a peek inside of the Charlatan API. They were happy to answer any questions I had and were very thorough in explaining what to expect and their expectations. If you don't know Ruby + rails, don't bother since it's the only language you're allowed to work with. This was one reason for automating the process, but the downsides of human-managed software were another. Deadnaming is when, intentionally or not, you refer to a trans person by the name they used before transitioning. While we want to iterate rapidly, we strive to never compromise the security of our customers nor the correctness of our code. At Betterment, were required by the government to have a record of a customers legal first name, but that shouldnt prevent us from letting customers share their preferred or chosen first name, and then using that name in the appropriate places. These guidelines constituted our opted out experienceviews that would receive this lightweight reskin immediately but not the full rebrand treatment. Using the JavaScript single page app framework, we would need a few things. . Maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration. I applied online. Process consisted of a phone screening with a recruiter, online tech assessment, and 2 video call interviews. However, in more complex testing scenarios, this dependency wont be as obvious. So lets take our feature spec. Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. On the one end is 100% test coverage using all the different kinds of tests: solitary unit tests, sociable more-integrated tests, and end-to-end tests; all features, fully covered, no exceptions. It does make you feel vulnerable, but it keeps you moving forward. Just the portfolio transition work alone includes significant new code for front-end enhancements which have nothing to do with trading. In our new roles, we are now informing and guiding many of the ongoing product and marketing efforts at Betterment. In addition, we knew that as our work on TCP progressed, we were going to need to iterate on our mathematical model. We went with option 2. In certain scenarios, its undesirable to buy or to sell a specific fund because of tax consequences. Suffice it to say, crypto will not be the focus of this post. Weve started an internal roundtable to voice our concerns about gender inequality in the workplace, weve sponsored and hosted Women in Tech meetups, and were starting to collaborate with other companies to bring awareness to the issue. 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. the application or models in question dont have a concept of private data The flagged code isnt actually insecure: e.g. 1 Betterment Junior Software Engineer interview questions and 1 interview reviews. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Hopefully, it is possible to write unit tests for at least a part of the method's behavior. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? From a list of strings, print them out in groups that are anagrams of each other. Below is a test written in Groovy, which sets up fixture data that mimics the exact situation in our Meet Joe example. Consider a controller that links attachments to a given document. Last summer, I built an avatar creator for K-12 students. Dan Kubb has been working as a Senior Staff Software Engineer for Betterment for 393 days. The last part of defining our SLOs is including a date when we plan to revisit that SLO specification. The client needs to know almost nothing. Before we dive into how we built it, lets revisit our requirements from above: Easily runnable in CI upon each commit An API that would be familiar to developers who are used to writing flutter screen tests The ability to test the integration between features within the system without needing to set up the entire app. The flag takes a seed that can be one of two things, either a 32 bit unsigned integer or the word random. Other Testing Recommendations Consider shared examples for last-mile regression coverage and repeated patterns. And then we reached the point where manual changes were hindering our productivity. 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. Memory managementif youll be passing anything other than primitive types back from Julia to Ruby (e.g. Final round was 2, 30 minute behavioral & soft skills interviews. To do good data work today, you need to use a system that is: Reproducible Its not personal, but I dont trust any number that comes without supporting code. That will reduce friction! So we tried that. As such, our technical interviews switched from whiteboards to computers. We're engineering Betterment to become a top-notch fintech company. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. If youve heard one thing about Julia, its probably about its blazingly fast performance. Soon enough, I had not only expanded my knowledge of engineering best practices, but I learned about dividends, tax loss harvesting, and IRAs (it stands for individual retirement account, in case you were wondering). We already use ACID-compliant datastores to solve these precise kinds of data persistence issues, so with the exception of really, really high volume operations (where a lot of noise and data loss canor mustbe tolerated), theres really no reason not to enqueue jobs co-transactionally with other data changes. Well fake the integration by using Sinatra to build a rack app that quacks like the real thing. So, how do we choose where to spend our time? Almost We were thrilled about the introduction of this copwe had actually written custom cops prior to its introduction to protect us against using the methods that dont escape content. Its a spectrum. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? 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. For this reason, we chose to wrapLABiometryTypebehind our ownBiometryTypeenum. At Betterment, we define CD as the process of making every small change to our system shippable as soon as its been built and tested. Menu . Fortunately, variants made removing legacy code quite straightforward. If I add another group named when a user is logged out, I would expect both groups to have setUp() methods that correctly create or set up the user model to have the correct authentication state. Explaining how we use sopsorific is best done by exploring how our secrets management workflow plays out for each stage of the software development lifecycle. When a secret is added to production, we have a check that makes sure that same secret is also added to all other ecosystems so that they continue to function properly. 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. Additionally, we have regulatory obligations to report complex data to third parties daily, making data engineering a mission critical part of what we do at Betterment. Building out the user interface. Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. Everyone was really nice and thoughtful and genuinely wanted to know about me. According to Healthline, because legal name changes are expensive, inaccessible, and not completely effective at eliminating deadnaming, institutions like Betterment can and should make changes to support our trans customers. 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. 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. But this article is not about the relative merits of these popular modern solutions. For much more on our TCP research, including additional considerations on the suitability of TCP to your circumstances, please see our white paper. It is notoriously hard to estimate the complexity of a task when it needs to be built into or on top of a legacy system. Instead, we opted to model our problem as a linear program. For example, we follow a set of pragmatic design principles drawn from SOLID (also created by Michael Feathers) to help ensure code quality. Less JavaScript. (Essentially, it means keeping our on-call engineers happy.) Shared code between services creates shared ownership, and shared ownership leads to undesirable coupling. Looking for the best java software engineer interview questions to ask candidates during your hiring process? Be the first to find this interview helpful, Get started with your Free Employer Profile. We used both historic and simulated data because they complement each other in making future-looking decisions: The historical data allows us to include important aspects of return movements, like auto-correlation, volatility clustering, correlation regimes, skew, and fat tails. Really good! 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. Took about an hour or two total. 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. We also split the main programming portion of our original interview into separate sections with different interviewers. These interviews are in Ruby on Rails - know ruby on rails beforehand, since it is difficult to read / implement on the spot. This can be accomplished by establishing a secure session on the server and running what you would normally run to get a console with the sopsorific run command. Thus, its important for engineers to do two things well: (a) be able to remove existing legacy code and (b) not to write code that is likely to become legacy code in the future. And on top of all that, is the front end code. Apply the learnings to future The less legacy code we have, the less we have to deal with the aforementioned processes. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. We not only had unit tests such as the one above to test simple scenarios where a human could calculate the outcome, but we also ran the optimizer in a simulated production-like environment, through hundreds of thousands of scenarios that closely resembled real ones. Use WebValve to define HTTP service fakes and toggle between real and fake services in non-production environments. You are viewing a web property located at Betterment.com. safejoinescapes the content and returns aSafeBuffer(a String flagged as safe) containing it. But I soon realized it was just the opposite: Knowing less about finance motivated me to learnquickly. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. Translating the problem into code If you want to jump right in, check out the full sample code. System specs are more performance intensive than the other spec types, so in most cases we lean towards fewer system specs that do more things, going against the convention that tests should be very granular with one assertion per test. When we first saw this project on the horizon, we realized it would end up requiring a substantial refactor of our web app. Why (And How) Betterment Is Using Julia Betterment is using Julia to solve our own version of the two-language problem." This is a departure from Touch ID which does not require a separate privacy permission, and which uses thelocalizedReasonstring parameter when showing its evaluation prompt. Understanding these tradeoffs is what helped our Engineering team at Betterment decide on a solution that made the most sense for our applications. And we think we made it a little easier for them (and us) to do just that. Were using AmazonsDatabase Migration Service(DMS) to replace our Luigi-implemented replication solution and re-building all other Luigi workflows in Airflow. However, you asked for themostrewarding, and I would have to say without a doubtthe mentorship. Companies should strive for a fair balance between adding new features and refactoring legacy code, and should establish a culture where thoughtful code design is a priority. Does not reflect any actual portfolio and is not a guarantee of performance. (Besides, no one wants to be an adult, right?) The links to the various services we use are in the same order as our new failure messages, but the link to CircleCI only goes to the workflow that shows the graph of all the tests and jobs that ran. 3. without the complication of a service boundary). Engineers' productivity and happiness decrease as even the smallest tasks can be frustrating and time-consuming. More from Betterment: Server Javascript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App Going to Work at Betterment Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? Its worth noting that in our case, were using Rubys sort_by method, which gives us a nondeterministic order in the case where remainders are equal. First, I needed to provide a translation of my own understanding of legal first names and preferred first names to our codebase. If theyre in our codebase, we should be able to iterate on the fakes without having to restart our server; the behavior isnt always right the first time, and restarting is tedious and it's not the Rails Way. These hard-working and talented individuals spend a large portion of their time developing models, researching new investment ideas and maintaining our research libraries. I was shocked! The key functionality (Ahem! But once we looked under the surface, #firstname was sprinkled nearly everywhere in our codebase. 3 step process for me: We dont want to invest all of his money into a single fund. Its delightful and easy to parse and has just the right amount of information. A web request was made, code was executed, and by enqueuing a job, we said we'd eventually do something. And why that's important. In the future, expect to read more from our team about how we use our data insights to drive product and growth development at Betterment. Betterments framework for locally developing and testing service-oriented apps in isolation with WebMock and Sinatra-based fakes. We now rely on Rubocops Rails/OutputSafety cop (instead of our custom cop) to help ensure that our team is making good decisions about escaping HTML content. No matter where they fall on that spectrum, each of these solutions has tradeoffs in its approach. We use SitePrism to abstract away bespoke page interactions and CSS selectors. 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. We implemented a local fallback mixin for Airflow maintained hooks that uses the local filesystem for development and testing, deferring to the actual hooks remote functionality only on production. However, writing mathematical proofs and small Java codes that complete standalone tasks seems pretty pointless now that Ive experienced the real world of software development. Next up was optimizing our portfolio management algorithms, which manage cashflows, rebalances, and tax exposures. Lots of STAR method and cultural fit questions. To test our algorithms-as-strategies, we simulated the thousands of potential futures they might encounter. 2. We can rewrite this test so that each test would pass if it were run first. All the new features were working on for customers with multiple accountsbe they Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), taxable investment accounts, trusts, joint accounts, or even synced outside accountsrequired this change. Flutter provides good solutions for both screen testing and UI testing, but what about the middle-ground? Being surrounded by a bunch of smart, helpful people has also been super amazing and helped me grow as an engineer. The complexity partly arose from the fact that we needed to duplicate business logic from the backend and the frontend. Im Jesse, a recruiter here at Betterment, and I had the immense pleasure of working closely with these two. This can make scheduling difficult, but in a city as competitive as New York is for engineering talent, weve found it valuable to get to the final offer stage as quickly as possible. Another disappointment we had with the old messaging was that it didnt make us feel very good when our tests passed. If you have influence in the hiring process, try to push for candidates who understand and respect these principles of data science. 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. IMHO, Betterment hiring process is best in the business. I searched every new term I came across and, when that wasnt enough, asked my co-workers for help. 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. One path through this flow contains a screen for changing your name and byline, then it bounces out to picking and cropping a profile image, then allows you to choose a preset border to put on your profile picture. 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. Dont persist a model unless you have to. Reflecting on Our Engineering Apprenticeship Program Betterment piloted an Apprentice Program to add junior talent to our engineering organization in 2017, and it couldnt have been more successful or rewarding for all of us. Separation of concerns between how we accessed data in our system and the business logic defining algorithmic behavior. 1 Betterment Software Engineer Internal Tools interview questions and 1 interview reviews. This allows the view to be reusable.

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