betterment software engineer interview

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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. 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. REST is semantic, evolvable, limber, and very familiar to us as Rails developers a natural other side of the coin for HTTP to make up the lingua franca of the web. Instead, when a new test is introduced that requires that dependency, the decision can be made to share it in such a way that its state gets reset prior to each test or to not share it at all and have each test create and set up the dependency itself. Julia has excellent support for technical computing and mathematical modelling. This rule speaks to the broader goal of authorization being obvious in our code. This database is a complete, real-time, read-only replica of our production database. Every component is on brand and consistent with every other app, feels polished, high quality and requires lower effort to implement. 1 Betterment Junior Software Engineer interview questions and 1 interview reviews. 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. Apply the learnings to future The less legacy code we have, the less we have to deal with the aforementioned processes. Onsite they give you a mock project where you have to complete the requirements. How it works now Now that we knowwhocan do what, lets talk abouthow they can do what they can do. What is Secrets Management? Requirements for Modern Data Analysis Spreadsheets fundamentally lack these properties essential to modern data work. 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. Find contacts: direct phone number, email address, work experience. 10 Common job interview questions for Civil Engineer. All of the code that handles changesets and messaging logic in the New World is written in one central location, and its tested in isolation. As such, our technical interviews switched from whiteboards to computers. Once we solve this very solvable idempotency problem, then were on track for the same net result as an exactly-once approach, even if it takes a couple extra attempts to get there. To do this, we used GSON, which lets you convert Java objects into JSON, and vice versa. We no longer write controller specs. Since then, the team has met several times to gather feedback and implement tweaks, but the broad strokes have remained unchanged. Your development is our priority. Additionally, we wanted an integration that we could spin-up quickly and with low ongoing cost; theres some fixed cost to getting a FFI-embed working rightbut once you do, its an exceedingly low cost integration to maintain. First, an idiomatic setup stance. 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. Weve usedUJSsprinkles in similar fashion to the rest of the Rails world over the years, but that has its limitations as we begin to design more complex behaviors and elements of our apps. The remaining test harness code was put in our normal codebase where it can be iterated on freely. Multiply the inflow (or the payout in the example above) by each weight (where the weights are the integer amounts of the buckets, so the contributions to the ticket in our example above), and divide each of these products by the sum of the buckets, finding the integer quotient and integer remainder Find the number of pennies that will be left over to allocate by taking the inflow minus the total of the integer quotients Sort the remainders in descending order and allocate any leftover pennies to the buckets in this order The idea here is that the quotients represent the amounts we should give each bucket aside from the leftover pennies. Please query for the associated record in a way that enforces authorization (e.g. Okay, weve got an app, a test harness, and robots to interact with the screens. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. 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. It also gave me a good view on what's day to day work is like. - Final interview, stay on one project, swap groups of different interviewers. Answer Example: "I would start by researching the existing system and understanding . 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. I highly recommend using 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. Its a term weve co-opted from ssl certificate lingo, and its meant to imply a chain of ownership from the authenticated user to a target resource. This was mainly because they were faster to run than request specs. The optimization package were using in this example, pythons scipy.optimize, provides a very expressive interface for specifying all of those bounds and constraints. I switch between 80s music, Broadway show tunes, Christian music, and classical music. By incorporating many of these practices, it is steadily becoming more and more fun to develop on the Betterment platform. The last straw for using whiteboards came from feedback provided by Betterments Women in Technology group. First proposed by Michael Feathers (who wrote the bible on working with legacy code) these tests simply take a set of verified inputs/outputs from the existing production legacy code and then assert that the output of the new code is the same as the legacy code under the same inputs. For Betterment engineers, it meant restructuring the underlying portfolio data model for increased flexibility. I cherished the opportunity and the challenge that comes with building with code. The portfolio optimization project took longer than initially estimated. 30 min recruiter screen - talk about your experience and why you are a good fit What could happen if we dont escapecontent? Answer Example: "As a junior software engineer, I believe the most . Heres the optimal solution: Managing Engineering Complexity Reaching the optimal balances would require our system to buy and sell securities in Joes investment accounts. 9.830lbsoffoodfromElaine's. That JavaScript gets evaluated by the browser. You want to help others whenever you can; and it has been the case that Ive received plenty of help from others who arent even directly on my team. As we see it, the members of Team Polaris are the bards of a data narrative that help the organization grow while delivering a top-tier product. The process took 2 weeks. Well, we aim to find an affordable, maintainable spot on that testing spectrum a la Justin Searls' advice. 30 min Q & A with head of recruiting - you ask questions, recruiter asks questions Our goals in standardizing the CI interface were to: Make it easier to distribute new CI features more quickly across the organization. In Betterments mobile apps, this means including trustworthy but convenient local authentication options for resuming active login sessions. In Luigi, we knew when the data was pulled and only then would we trigger a task. safeconcathas the same functionality asrawandhtmlsafeit simply marks the content safe as is by returning it in aSafeBuffer. Solution Street has been evolving. 2) Small take home problem, mostly about correctly reading requirements and providing an implementation. I get it, maybe you only want to hire people who know Ruby and that's fine, however you shouldn't waste other people's time. When the day of the big reveal arrived, all that would be left to do was toggle the flag to unveil the code wed shipped and tested weeks before. Given requirements, explain how one may model some data. He had great communication, was organized and empathetic, remembered things I said weeks earlier, etc. There are a few other advantages and problems this system solves too: Were able to make global changes in a pretty painless way. Standardize and educate A major part of our data warehouse build out was in clarifying definitions of business terms and key metrics present in our daily parlance. Heres the view partial from Style Closet: You can see how the component.message is passed into the dedicated space/ slot keeping this code flexible forreuse. To ensure true randomness, always pass random as the seed. 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. If we find a match, we return it, if we don't then we throw a helpful exception to guide the developer on how to fix the issue. In a few anecdotes throughout your talk, you mentioned the importance of having mentors and role models. In doing all of these things, weve reduced bottlenecks for developers so they can focus more on shipping features and less on managing secrets. For example, if you have 10 yoe, that may land you a senior role here with ~185k total liquid comp but 350k+ elsewhere at public, big tech companies Continue reading 11 people found this review helpful Helpful The Julia library we built for this purpose serves around 18 million requests per day, and very efficiently at that. While working, I would take any available time for courses on websites like Codecademy and Team Treehouse. Within the boundaries of that principle, we considered multiple interview formats, including take-home and online assessments, and several variations of pair programming interviews. Then, we could rearrange these chunks to replicate all sorts of trading activity patterns. Consider these principles, along with our current and future open source work, part of our contribution to that conversation. AWS KMS doesanchoredencryption right. Finding and Preventing Rails Authorization Bugs This article walks through finding and fixing common Rails authorization bugs. If youre significantly exercising behavior not in the layer youre writing a test for, you might be putting the test in the wrong place. 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. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? Sopsorific uses the term ecosystem to describe this concept, as well as collectively describe a suite of apps that make up a working Betterment system. For this reason, we chose to wrapLABiometryTypebehind our ownBiometryTypeenum. When I sat down with them to solicit feedback on our entire hiring process, they pointed to the whiteboard problem-solving dynamics (one to two engineers sitting, observing, and judging the candidate standing at a whiteboard) as unnatural and awkward. Lets start out by exploring that robot testing technique I mentioned earlier. We went with option 2. To migrate to Airflow, were deprecating our Luigi solution on two fronts: cross-database replication and task orchestration. At Betterment, we build public facing applications without an authorization framework by following three principles, discussed in another blog post. Under the covers, request specs are just a thin wrapper around Rails integration tests. Well only be notified if, over 7 days or 30 days or even longer, they exceed the target goal weve defined for our service. Messages about failures are nowactionableandfull of context,prompting the engineer to participate in CI,to go directly to their failures or to their PR. We acknowledge that many applications out there cant make the same design decisions about users data, but as a general principle we recommend reducing the ways in which that data can be accessed. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? Several times we ran into corner cases around old users, test users, and other anomalous data that caused false positive failures in our characterization tests. To incorporate a third-party solver into our system, we built a translation layer that received our system-generated constraints and objective function as inputs, and utilized those inputs to solve the model using a third-party API. If there is significant conditional behavior in the view layer and you are looking to make your system spec leaner, you may want to extract that conditional behavior to a presenter resource model and test that separately in a model spec so that you dont need to worry about testing it in a system spec. I applied online. I applied online. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2021. We store fake responses with a URI template, a status code, and a body. For this we used a modified version of Very Good Venture's robot testing pattern that would allow us to reuse screen interactions across multiple tests while also making our tests very readable from even a non-engineering perspective. This algorithm is called theLargest Remainder Method. Whether its a database query, a Web-scraping function, a MapReduce job, or a PDF extraction, script it and include it in your reproducible process. Interviews at Betterment Experience Positive 47% Negative 34% Neutral 19% Getting an Interview Applied online 74% Recruiter 15% Employee Referral 6% Difficulty 2.8 Average Hard Average Easy Interviews for Top Jobs at Betterment Software Engineer (18) Customer Experience Associate (8) Product Designer (4) Product Manager (4) 1) Phone screen about the company 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. Ill discuss these more below. Consistency is key, said Jesse. I applied online. A multi-threaded, SQL-driven ActiveJob backend used at Betterment to process millions of background jobs per day. It's a joke feed, but they have some great tech and security points and articles shared there. More broadly, a 2015 survey of large businesses in the UK reported that 17% had experienced direct financial losses because of spreadsheet errors. 1 Betterment Junior Software Engineer interview questions and 1 interview reviews. This kind of scaffolding allowed us to go in and out of the current platform to capture and store precise inputs and outputs, while isolating them away from any unnecessary stuff that wasnt relevant to the core trading processes. An easy trap to fall into as an object-oriented developer is to get too caught up in the idea that everything has to be an object. While we love the simplicity and flexibility of Backbone, weve recently encountered situations where the Backbone router didnt perfectly fit the needs of our increasingly sophisticated application. 2 hr ByteBoard interview - 40 min design and algorithms (know your standard data structures and algorithms), 70 mins implementing some methods Out of 7 offers my decision came down to between Betterment and another company. Were excited to see how the model of projects and project types that we built for CI will evolve to help us templatize ourKubernetesdeployments. All crypto keys matchThere are checks to ensure the multi-region KMS key ARNs and backup PGP key fingerprint in the sops config file matches the intended security zones. Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. Shh Its a Secret: Managing Secrets at Betterment Opinionated secrets management that helps us sleep at night. 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. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2023. This post was written with Dan Egan. Weve also developed a partnership with Peoplism. free the memory) when its done with it (Ruby-FFI has good support for triggering a callback when an object goes out-of-scope on the Ruby side). Were excited to share the approach we took to incorporating it into our stack and the challenges we encountered along the way. Instead of simply instructing and watching candidates as they program, interviewers can now work with them on a real-world problem, and they take turns in control of the keyboard. It wasnt enough. We valued sending Slack messages to our engineers, as thats how the company communicates most effectively, but we didnt like the rate of communication or the content of those messages. Candidates applying for Software Engineer had the quickest hiring process (on average 22 days), whereas Product Designer roles had the slowest hiring process (on average 39 days). Its a new era with a new scale of data, and its time to define new norms around management of and inferences from business data. if unit tests ran on 20 containers and 18 of them saw failures, only notify once) Only notifyonceabout all the green things Give as muchcontextas possible without being overwhelming: beconcisebutclear Next well explore the changes we made in content. It allows room for future growth which will inevitably happen. Given the formulaic patterns of these bugs, we decided static analysis would be a worthwhile endeavor. Request specs are not mandatory if the controller code paths are exercised in a system spec and they are not doing something different from the average controller in your app. Photo credit: Christine Meintjes Abi: Can you speak about a time in your life where impostor syndrome was limiting in your own career? Points for trying though, right? CircleCIs orbs). During your interview, the interviewer may use your resume and cover letter as a reference to guide questions and additional interview topics. This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. The last part of defining our SLOs is including a date when we plan to revisit that SLO specification. If you don't know Ruby + rails, don't bother since it's the only language you're allowed to work with. - Final interview, stay on one project, swap groups of different interviewers. One problem was purely coding while the other involved system design on the whiteboard. On Fishbowl, you can share insights and advice anonymously with Betterment employees and get real answers from people on the inside. In 2012, I graduated from the University of Portland with a degree in computer science and promptly moved to the Bay Area. This resulted in app code (the content-specific code) becoming entangled with system (the base HTML) code. And here weare! Today, on its first day, were thrilled to announce that the Betterment iOS app fully supports Apples new Face ID technology on the iPhone X. Trusting the SecureEnclave While were certainly proud of shipping this feature quickly, a lot of credit is due to Apple for how seriously the company takes device security and data privacy as a whole. There was the feature work stream which involved: Storing the users new name information. Rolling your own cryptoisnt a great idea. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. We dont expect these principles to appeal to everybody. Attaching to our example function with Ruby-FFI is straightforward: From here, we could begin using our function, but it wouldnt be entirely pleasant to work withconverting an input array to a pointer and processing the result would require some tedious boilerplate. Lets plug in some balances to see what the expected value of V is with Joes current holdings: V=0.07*5500+0.04*5500+0.06*2750+0.05*2750=907.5 Certainly, we can do better. Please query for the associated record in a way that enforces authorization (e.g. 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. There were aspects of the page elements (our shared chunks) that needed to change based on their context or the page where they were being rendered. This is the slightly nicer part of SLOs versus simple monitors - we arent going to be pinged for every latency failure or error rate spike. Separately, they could set up a taxable retirement account invested likewise in 90% stocks and 10% bonds. Fidel Severino: The opportunity to join Betterments Apprenticeship program came via the Flatiron School. Over-testing takes more development time, can add additional work when refactoring or adding new features, slows down the overall test suite, and sets the wrong example for others when referencing existing tests. The trick here is that JavaScript is a simple call to jQuerys htmlmethod, and we use Rails built-in partial view rendering to respond with all the HTMLwe need. It also showed how an asset allocation would perform over the lifetime of an investment. This blog post discusses the different responsibilities of these types of specs, and other related high level guidelines for specs. You might guess that you can express it as follows: The above statements assert that the sum of the balances of VTI across Joes accounts must be equal to half of his total balance. Explore. First, lets take a look at the underlying framework we use for enqueuing and executing said jobs. I will also share our vision for an Event Narrative Data Warehouse and how we are leveraging start-up friendly partners such as MixPanel for real-time event processing, funneling, and segmentation. Now that we have our objective function and constraints set up, we just need to solve these equations. Proper reliability is the greatest operational requirement for any service2. For example, they think theyre frauds, or unqualified for their jobs, regardless of their achievements. It's better to ask a question and move forward with your problem than it is to struggle over an answer. Instead of simply instructing and watching candidates as they program, interviewers can now work with them on a real-world problem, and they take turns in control of the keyboard. This makes our secrets less likely to unintentionally leak and our security team a little happier. This solved the problem found in traditional systems where a single node acts as the gatekeeper, which can get backed up, either breaking the system or leading to idle testing time. After some time, we found ourselves with an application that had a lot of complexity and splintered code practices throughout. Hopefully, it is possible to write unit tests for at least a part of the method's behavior. Therefore, we decided to extract our allocation code into a module function. Ive always had a curious mind. As demonstrated, Rails provides some methods that mark content as safe without escaping it for us. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. Second, flutter_driver is more about UI/E2E testing rather than integration testing, meaning wed need to run an instance of the app on a device, navigate to a flow we wanted to test, and then test the flow. Julia solves this issue by making it very simple to take a piece of research code and refactor it for production use. Collecting the SLIs and Creating the SLOs The SRE team has a web-app and CLI called coach that we use to manage continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), among other things. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. This article is part ofEngineering at Betterment. From a design standpoint, executing a preferred name feature was pretty straightforwardwe needed to provide a user with a way to share their preferred name with us, and then start using it. This looks very similar to a Sinatra app, and that's because it is onewith some additional magic baked in. InfoSec Taylor Swift. I searched every new term I came across and, when that wasnt enough, asked my co-workers for help. Meet Blazer: A New Open-Source Project from Betterment (video) While we love the simplicity and flexibility of Backbone, weve recently encountered situations where the Backbone router didnt perfectly fit the needs of our increasingly sophisticated application. Theres no context to orient us quickly to what the notification is for. In our app we use dio and not dart:io's built-in HTTP client mostly due to preference and slight feature set differences. The second restrictionmaintaining the portfolio allocation of 50% stocks and 50% bondsmight seem straightforward, but theres a catch. But the era of the spreadsheet is over. Theres actually a critical security bug here that allows the client to specify any attachment_id, even if they dont own that attachment - eek! So weve established that we dont want to hit external services in tests, which we can do through WebMock or similar libraries. Typically, they use real devices or sometimes a simulator/emulator and real backend services. And on top of all that, is the front end code. Linear programs try to optimize the value of an objective function. Uncertainty like this makes it hard to build new and awesome features into a product. And when my decision making got bogged down at the end he didn't try to hassle me with silly deadlines. I couldnt tell you what a dividend was. Performance Review Generator Create a peer to peer review using performance evaluation phrases. This put a band-aid on the problem for a short while. A lot of the time, the plugin code is also integration tested as well because the benefits outweigh the costs for many plugins, e.g. Then we can generate a fake for our "trading" collaborator service using rails generate webvalve:fake_service Trading. Our reliance on background jobs even allows us to guarantee the eventual consistency of our distributed systems, but more on that later. My interactions with technology prior to learning about programming had always been as a consumer. Rails provides rich template resolver logic at every level of the view hierarchy, and we were able to easily hook into it by simply modifying the extensions of our new layout files. Given those requirements, we took a step back to make a few overarching design decisions. If youre not seeing numbers you expect, or it is taking a long time to come up with a solution, the initial guess is often the first place to start. Lets call it resilience. 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. 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. 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. From here, we do the things we couldnt do beforepull real parameters out of the requests and feed them back into the fake response to make it more realistic. In addition, Rails has a few methods that provide help in escaping content. If the value forprojecttypeisruby_appthen the.circleci/config.ymlgenerator will follow certain conventions for Ruby programs, like including a job to run tests withRSpecor including a job to run static analysis commands likeRubocopandBrakeman.

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