Given those requirements, we took a step back to make a few overarching design decisions. 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. If you remember nothing else, remember this. Take home test was easy and you were allowed to do it in a language of your choosing. So, the second major difference is that we inject a fake HTTP configuration into our network stack so that we can run nearly all of our code for real but cut out the other unreliable and costly dependency. 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. Conclusion The path to building a highly available data processing service was not straightforward, requiring us to build a few specific but critical additions to Airflow. I stayed there for several years until last May, when I uprooted my life to New York for Betterment, and I havent looked back since. Being that Java only covered a small piece of this structure, I had a lot of languages to learn. Luckily, we can use Rubys powerful metaprogramming abilities to abstract all that awaycreating a declarative way to wrap an arbitrary Julia function which results in a familiar and easy-to-use interface for Ruby developers. But we do believe strongly that theres more to agree about than our industry has been able to establish so far. And on top of all that, is the front end code. Then there was a second round interview with another software engineer, a technical project manager and the director of engineering. And no one needs to manually edit the.circleci/config.ymlfile again. 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. Legacy code is a form of technical debtthe sooner it gets fixed, the less time it will take to fix in the future. It is bootstrapped (sampled in chunks) to help generate potential futures. Then we do the same for the deposit API call. Lets say that each account holds $50,000, for a total of $150,000 in investments. AWS KMS doesanchoredencryption right. Its definitely the case that a team might not be at the level of operational maturity where defining product or user-specific service level objectives is in the cards. If Betterment has a relationship or affiliation with the author or content, it will note this in additional disclosure. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? To meet those challenges, we believe its essential to share more than languages, libraries, and context-free best practices. Awesome, now that we have an app and a harness we can use to test it, how are the tests actually written? What kind of monitoring would be necessary to detect such a failure, across all the features of our app, and all the types of jobs it might try to run? Dont get swallowed by a faceless engineering org. Then, with our meticulous notes compiled, it became clear to us that our major challenges lay with the accessibility to and reliability of key performance metrics. Finding and Preventing Rails Authorization Bugs This article walks through finding and fixing common Rails authorization bugs. I did not get the offer but I would have declined as I was offered a position from two other companies. While optimizing for code reuse is generally desirable, rewriting our financial models in JavaScript benefited the product in two noticeable ways: It increased testing and organizational understanding. Simply put, weve asserted that the sum of the balances of every fund in Joes taxable account must remain at $11,000. Find out what is missing from the rails app. If youve read this far, wed encourage you to take the leap and test out the delayed gem for yourself!
Engineering Jobs at Betterment First things firstdefining our view of the problem space. This owner method for Rails apps results in all logs, error reports, and metrics being tagged with the teams name, and at deploy time it's aggregated by a Coach CLI command and turned into latency monitors with reasonable defaults for optional parameters; essentially doing the same thing as our config-driven approach but from within the code itself class DeploysController < ApplicationController owner "sre", max_response_time: "10000ms", only: [:index], slack: false end For Java apps we have a similar interface (with reasonable defaults as well) in a tidy little annotation. Any insights would be helpful. It might take some time to convince the rest of your organization to receive reports in these more modern formats. Weve gotten such an enthusiastic response about designing future events around issues that women (and everyone!) Legacy code can take a long time to properly test and remove. 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? In that case, your request spec becomes like your system spec, and you should assert that the response body is correct for important use cases. - Phone screen, nice recruiter. Because its in source control and it runs through its own CI process, we can also easily roll out changes to notifications without breaking things. For instance, at Betterment, we faced the challenge of allocating a sum of money proportionally across multiple buckets. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. Interviewers were professional throughout. Its only been about three decades since companies started using any kind of computer-assisted data analysis. Keep in mind, descriptive group names go a long way in adding clarity to what dependencies that bucket relies upon. For Java apps and libraries we run integration and unit tests by default as well asPMDas part of our static code analysis. So even if your queue lives in an entirely separate datastore, it can be effectively coupled to your DB's IOPS and CPU limitations. 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. Tests were flakey and we didnt know if it was our Jenkins setup, the tests themselves, or both. You will need to be passingly familiar with the language they're using. Most recently, Isis Wenger, a San Francisco-based platform engineer, sparked the #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign, a Twitter initiative designed to combat gender inequality in tech. To add a new set of constraints, engineers simply provide an implementation of a TradingConstraintGenerator. Below is an example request spec. 1 Betterment Junior Software Engineer interview questions and 1 interview reviews. We think engineers should focus on what they care about the most, shipping great features quickly and reliably. 5. Work with nonprofits: Groups like NCWIT, the YWCA, the Anita Borg Institute, the Scientista Foundation, and several others are so great for community outreach and company morale. They say multiple times that you can come into this job not knowing any rails, and that the interviewers will be accommodating of your background, this is a quarter true. At Betterment, were usingJuliato power the projections and recommendations we provide to help our customers achieve their financial goals. Was the error budget consumed by real failures? For instance, is the dollar amount above the target balance in emerging markets bondsthe asset class to where VWOB belongs. Their goal is to test you on your collaboration skills (as well as technical skill). Make sure that the bulk of the logic youre testing in a model spec is in the method youre exercising (unless the underlying methods are private). These include the ability for apps to share a job queue but run separate workers (i.e. We useUpstartto define all Airflow services and simply wrap the TERM behavior in our workers post-stop script, sending the TERM signal first, waiting until we see the Celery process stopped, then finally poweroff the machine. What did change, however, was how each transaction type was translated into trading activity, which is what we wanted to test exhaustively. There needs to be a way to set up a new project. These barriers led us to not pursue flutter_drivertests as our solution. Designing an Off Ramp Just as we are committed to rolling out large changes in small portions, we are careful to avoid huge changesets on the other side of a release. Had one interview for a temp customer representative position. This way, if we cant achieve perfect allocation, we have a buffer that we can fillalbeit at a penalty. Thinking big, we decided to dub ourselves Team Polaris after the sky's brightest star. The process took 3 weeks. It's important to have tests in place before changing code to be as confident as possible that the behavior of the code is not changing during refactoring. Pretty awesome. 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. I applied through a recruiter. 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. I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. Last fall, Betterment optimized its portfolio, moving from the original platform to an upgraded trading platform that included more asset classes and the ability to weight exposure of each asset class differently for every level of risk. We went with option 2. Separately, they could set up a taxable retirement account invested likewise in 90% stocks and 10% bonds.
For that, our app has a thin wrapper around the http package called HttpClient. Understanding these tradeoffs is what helped our Engineering team at Betterment decide on a solution that made the most sense for our applications. We came up with ACES: Automated, Consistent, Efficient, and Self-serviced as the motifs by which we could create a measurable feedback loop. Betterments framework for locally developing and testing service-oriented apps in isolation with WebMock and Sinatra-based fakes. Julia also has a very rich type system where researchers can build prototypes without type declarations, and then later refactoring the code where needed with type declarations for dispatch or clarity. It ensures that new features can be shipped more quickly, it allows new services to adopt our standardized CI strategy with ease, and it lets us recover faster in the face of disastera hurricane causing a power outage at one of our data centers. Get started with your Free Employer Profile, The Ultimate Job Interview Preparation Guide. While we love the concern that our engineers show toward solving these problems, these deviations became problematic for applications of the same runtime that should abide by the same set of rules; for example, all Ruby apps should runRSpecandRubocop, not just some of them. 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. 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. Anything that didnt get a new, rebranded template stayed in the world of plain old production. However, in keeping with the company mission to provide smarter investing, it was clear that re-engineering our code was essential to creating a better product. Taking the time to understand the code and write tests before refactoring will save you headaches in the future. Cassidy Williams, Venmo engineer, said impostor syndrome tends to be more common in high-achieving women. Now that weve wrangled our CI process and encoded the best practices into a tool, were ready to tackle our Continuous Deployment pipeline. Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. Commercial Customer Service Representative. But this kind of explicit, attribute-heavy approach helped us get this tooling off the ground while we developed (and continue to develop) in-code annotation approaches. Coding challenge and Sys design. Working behind the scenes, the members of our Quantitative Investing team bring our customers the projections and recommendations they rely on for keeping their goals on-track. Cassidy: For a while at work, I was very nervous that I was the least knowledgeable person in the room, and that I was going to get fired because of it. Cost-Effective Scalability Since our processing needs fluctuate throughout the day, we were paying for computing power we didnt actually need during non-peak times on a single machine, as shown in our Luigi servers load. Find contacts: direct phone number, email address, work experience. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. We use the YAML format because of its readability and terseness. What resource is the authenticated user operating on? The.circleci/config.ymlfile was getting longer than a thousand lines fast, partly because we didnt want to use any YAML shortcuts to hide away what was being run, and partly because there were no higher-level mechanisms available at the time for re-use when writing YAML (e.g. 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. 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. Using the JavaScript single page app framework, we would need a few things. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jun 2019. The culture of learning. 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. Jesse Harrelson, a Betterment Software Engineer, not only leads our hosting events, they found a path to Betterment through Women Who Code. 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. A nice property that weve observed at Betterment, and that might apply to you as well, is that the number of jobs tends to scale proportionally with the number of customers and accounts. You may have noticed that unlike the previous example, the vulnerable code doesnt directly reference a params.permit call or any of the parameter names, but the code was still flagged. Under the covers, request specs are just a thin wrapper around Rails integration tests. Its all about the customer This is where the philosophy of defining and keeping track of SLOs comes into play. Granted, having exactly-once semantics would be preferable, but if we cannot be sure that our jobs run at least once, then we must ask ourselves: how would we know if something didnt run at all? Most teams need to deploy to multiple environments: production, staging, feature branches, sales demos, etc. CI/CD: Shortening the Feedback Loop As we improve and scale our CD platform, shortening the feedback loop with notifications was a small, effective, and important piece. Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. Furthermore, because of the CPU-intensive nature behind our calculations, heavy bursts of simultaneous customers could compromise a given servers response time. When before it could take weeks of both product engineering and SRE time to set up CI for an application or service within a complex ecosystem of bash scripts and Jenkins jobs and application configuration, now it takes minutes. In that case, we would just need to define the secrets that have different values in a separate secrets file likedevintest.ymlbelow wheredevintestis the name of the ecosystem. Each set of strategies was confronted with both bootstrapped historical data and novel simulated data. These tests are as close to end-to-end tests as we can get without actually running on a real device using flutter_driver. The parent object of any activity inside the Betterment platform is a user transaction that includes deposits or withdrawals to a goal, dividends, allocation changes, transfer of money between goals and so on. Interviewers were professional throughout. Create an input queue: We created a bucket with every simulationmore than 200,000we wanted to run. We sent out questionnaires in advance but collected answers through face-to-face dialogue. Reproducible also means efficient. Company Executive1:1 on your background and the company. Lets consider a hypothetical customer account example. Then there are outliers Yet sometimes even the best practices still didnt apply to a piece of legacy code. Building those small, tight-knit groups promotes relationships that can help the company over time. Perhaps the simplest is to have the Ruby side allocate the memory into which the Julia function should write its result (and pass the Julia function a pointer to that memory). Overall, the process was great. 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. Technical interviewsSeries of pair-programming challenges, 2. To solve this problem, we developed WebValvea tool that allows us to define and register fake implementations of HTTP services and toggle between real and fake services in non-production environments. At Betterment, we build public facing applications without an authorization framework by following three principles, discussed in another blog post. Lets start out by exploring that robot testing technique I mentioned earlier. He calls around to all the stores just to see what the have in stock and puts together each stores inventory: Ingredients in stock (lbs) Elaines Georges Jerrys Newmans Chicken 5 6 2 3 Carrots 1 8 5 2 Thyme 3 19 16 6 Onions 6 12 10 4 Noodles 5 0 3 9 Garlic 2 1 1 0 Parsley 3 6 2 1 Also, the quality of the bags at all of the stores vary, limiting the total number pounds of food the Soup Nazi can carry back. Step 2: 2-3 hour pair programming technical round in an IDE. Editing a file is as simple as: sops deployment_secrets/sensitive/production.yml Testing We built a series of validations into sopsorific to further enforce our opinions about secrets management. We are so lucky to have you! This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. Needless to say I definitely wish I could stay and work with Betterment rather than going back to school next week, but todays society is under the strange impression that a college degree is important, so I guess Ill finish it out. 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. I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. It was built out over the past few years, with many different paradigms and patterns. Engineering the Trading Platform: Inside Betterments Portfolio Optimization To complete the portfolio optimization, Betterment engineers needed enhance the code in our existing trading platform. It is a read-only, star-schema representation of fact and dimensional tables for growth subject areas. Here Id like to discuss some philosophical approaches to defining SLOs, explain how they help with prioritization, and outline the tooling currently available to Betterment Engineers to make this process a little easier. I applied online. Onboarding new hires familiar with the Rails framework will be faster, and those who arent familiar can find great external (and internal) resources to learn it.
I cherished the opportunity and the challenge that comes with building with code. How is pay, wlb & work culture. Not only does this increase test readability (each set up method will set up only the dependencies needed for the tests below it and within the same scope in the testing tree), but this reduces the scope for potential problems. 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. Therefore, the cop should hold the same opinions aboutsafe_concatas it does about the other two methods. I had two exceptional mentors who went above and beyond and removed any blocks preventing me from accomplishing tasks. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. Were continually evaluating whether to adopt this process for other roles, as well. To capture that idea, we introduced a concept we call security zones into sopsorific. All we need is the server. Each variable represents the expected value of holding a particular fund in a particular account. On the other hand, some methods are just a means for us to mark content as already safe. Our Ruby code looks like this. Check out more error budget math here. Interviews at Betterment Experience Positive 56% Negative 28% Neutral 17% Getting an Interview Applied online 81% Recruiter 6% Employee Referral 6% Difficulty 2.9 Average Hard Average Easy Interviews for Top Jobs at Betterment Software Engineer (18) Customer Experience Associate (8) Product Designer (4) Product Manager (4)
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