We use cutting-edge technology to build cutting-edge technology. Implementing the Rebrand without a Spaghetti of IF Statements Our rebranded experience would become the default at launch time, so another challenge we faced was maintaining two worlds without creating unneeded complexity. Non-CPU intensive tasks (e.g. From an engineering standpoint, this question revealed a few hurdles that we needed to clear up. polling a database) can run on higher concurrency per CPU core to save overall resources. start on starting web-app stop on stopping web-app respawn exec su -s /bin/bash -l -c '\ cd /var/www/web-app; \ exec "$0" "$@"' web-app-owner -- sopsorific run 'bundle exec puma -C config/puma.rb' >> /var/log/upstart.log 2>&1 >Operations The 12-factor app methodology reminds us that sometimes developers need to be able to run one-off admin tasks by starting up a console on a live running server. are kept secure at every stage of the software development lifecycle. Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401(k) for small and medium-sized businesses. But we did things a little differently, which saved us thousands of computing hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Building those small, tight-knit groups promotes relationships that can help the company over time. Instead of using a client side MVC framework to help enable us to write a single page app, we opted to use our Rails server to render views, and we used server generated JavaScript responses to make the app feel just as snappy for our customers. 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. 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. The novelty of our approach was to essentially build partial, precise scaffolding around our current platform. We hone our interview process to ensure youre able to show us your best self. A PR build failed. 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. Cassidy Williams, Venmo engineer, said impostor syndrome tends to be more common in high-achieving women. We needed a workflow with less of a bottleneck, but allowing every developer access to all the secrets across the organization wasnotan acceptable answer. For Java apps and libraries we run integration and unit tests by default as well asPMDas part of our static code analysis. Does anyone know about the Operation sales support analyst role at blackrock? We were able to achieve a polished and consistent visual identity under a tight deadline which was pretty great, but when we had our project retrospective, we realized there was a pain point that still loomed over us. That means, x=[a1,a2,,a7,b1,b2d7]. The component consists of 3 parts: structure, behavior and appearance. We can rewrite this test so that each test would pass if it were run first. During testing, we often ran into scenarios where our model had no feasible solutionusually due to a bug we had introduced. While we want to iterate rapidly, we strive to never compromise the security of our customers nor the correctness of our code. Bootstrapping is a process by which you take random chunks of historical data and re-order it. 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? dropping a database column that no longer makes sense in the current code structure), it's safe to assume that there will be data issues that will consume a significant portion of developer time, especially with older data. Be the first to find this interview helpful, Get started with your Free Employer Profile. This light coat of paint was applied to our production layer, so any experience that couldnt be fully redesigned within our timeline would still get a fresh header and the fonts and colors that reflected our new brand. Perhaps wed want to generalize the approach even further. Fortunately, it was a fun experience and it really took very little time! Tell us a bit about your life before Betterment. 1 Betterment Software Engineer Mobile IOS interview questions and 1 interview reviews. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? Of course, job resolution doesnt necessarily mean success. Legacy code is a form of technical debtthe sooner it gets fixed, the less time it will take to fix in the future. Well, we aim to find an affordable, maintainable spot on that testing spectrum a la Justin Searls' advice. Fidel Severino: Oh man! 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. Theres so many things I would love to list here. 30 min recruiter screen - talk about your experience and why you are a good fit We use a multi-threaded web server for our production application, and so when we make a call into the Julia shared library, we push that call onto a queue where it gets picked up and performed by a single executor thread which then communicates the result back to the calling thread using apromiseobject. The contract files themselves are about the syntax and structure of requests and responses rather than the interpretation. Interested in engineering at Betterment? And here weare! Our team is passionate about our mission: making people's lives better. We provide a class that exposes the developer-friendly configuration API for fake responses, and we implement the HttpClientAdapter interface provided by dio. I applied through a recruiter. The success of projects like these dont come down to the code itselfit comes down to the design of the solution based on its specific needs. We recently re-optimized our portfolio to include more complex asset allocations and risk models (and it will soon be available). 4. The key to the success of this project was to keep the build simple, maintain a low risk of regressions, and ensure a clear path to remove the legacy brand code after launch. 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. 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. We like to extract standard assertions such as ones relating to authentication into shared examples. In this model there is no single controller. 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. In this example, we want to maximize the expected value of the holdings in Joes accounts. We're always searching for extraordinary people to join our team. Crys also built out a delightful flow that shows the user why we require their legal name, that answers a few common questions, and allows them to edit their preferred first name in the future if needed. Too tough to call. It makes communicating with our regulators easier, and is doing so in a pretty impressive fashion. In practice, that might look something like this: Resulting in a function for which the fact that the underlying implementation is in Julia has been completely abstracted away: Challenges & Pitfalls Debugging an FFI integration can be challenging; any misconfiguration is likely to result in the dreadedsegmentation faultthe cause of which can be difficult to hunt down. Interviews are now more prescriptive regarding non-technical questions. We built our own internal framework for modeling mathematical programs that was not tied to our trading systems domain-specific business logic. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. Proper reliability is the greatest operational requirement for any service2. Just as the Ford Motor Company created efficiency with assembly line production and Pixar opened up new worlds by computerizing animation, companies now are innovating and improving the craft of using data to do business. Well-tested code stored in version control that could easily be changed and developed. Through the magic of libraries. On the other end of the spectrum there are no tests at all; YOLO, just ship-it. With our app being add-to-app and utilizing plugins, we didnt want to have to run anything native in our testing. Open Many analyses meet the above ideals but have been produced with expensive, proprietary statistical software that inhibits sharing and reproducibility. 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. I aced all my other onsite interviews and I currently have two offers from FAANG companies and a handful of offers from some other startups. Changing the objective function and adding new constraints needed to be easy to do. 1 Betterment Software Engineering interview questions and 1 interview reviews. 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. If an application absolutely needs to be able to show certain data, consider structuring the endpoint in a way such that a client cant even attempt to request another users data. Cleaning, Reshaping, Summarizing Every dataset includes some amount of errant, corrupted, or outlying observations. For many trans folks like myself, this is the name assigned at birth which means all legal and government issued IDs and documents use this non-affirming name. That keeps us moving fast and not breaking things. Alongside this manual testing pain, the automated testing in the existing iOS and android codebases was inconsistent. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. Well go into contributing to our platform in more detail below. We like it because its easy to introduce to a codebase, violations break builds in clear and actionable ways, and disabling specific checks requires engineers to comment their code in a way that makes it easy to surface during code review. Our internal Diversity and Inclusion Committee holds regular meetings to discuss current events and topics, highlights recognition months (like Black History and Womens History Months), and celebrates the many backgrounds and experiences of our employees. This led to maintenance issues, and it made our application harder to test. Well fake the integration by using Sinatra to build a rack app that quacks like the real thing. From an engineering standpoint, the end goal was to integrate much of the original IRA calculators code, plus additional calculations, into Betterments Web application to create RetireGuide as a consumer-facing tool. 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. Find out what is missing from the rails app. Jesse Harrelson: Seriously though, it was the combination of all that plus so many other things. Its just native MySQL master-slave replication; easy to set up and maintain on dedicated hardware or in the cloud. Secret-editor roles are named after their corresponding IAM role which includes the security zone and the name of the GitHub repository. My interactions with technology prior to learning about programming had always been as a consumer. Getting the infrastructure into a production-ready format took a bit of tweaking, but we are now starting to realize a lot of the benefits we hoped for when setting out on this journey, including faster development of production ready models, and a clear separation of responsibilities between the SMEs on the Investing team who are best suited for designing and specifying the models, and the engineering team who have the knowledge on how to scale that code into a production-grade library. I was part of the Core CRM Team. Williams has been included as one of Glamour Magazine's 35 Women Under 35 Who Are Changing the Tech Industry and listed in the Innotribe Power Women in FinTech Index. This is such a minor change, in fact, that we were able to reuse all of our same view controllers that we had built for Touch ID with only a handful of string values that are now determined at runtime. Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, The process took 1 week. Screening with HR, Call with hiring manager, case study, 3-4 hours of interview with the team and other members (each 30 minutes). Tooling To simplify development, we use a lot of tooling and infrastructure developed both in-house and by the Julia community. We did it! We might take a look at the metrics were using (the SLIs), the failures that chipped away at our target goal, and, if necessary, re-evaluate the relevancy of what were measuring. These validations are run as a step in our Continuous Integration suite. On the other hand, shared-nothing teams can lead to information silos, wheel-reinventing, and integration nightmares when an initiative is too big for a squad to deliver alone. Examples include request authorization and common validation/error handling: Each specs description begins with an action verb, not a helping verb like should, will or something similar. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. First there was an online assessment by ByteBoard. If the service doesnt work as intended, no user (or engineer) will be happy. Each set of strategies was confronted with both bootstrapped historical data and novel simulated data. Julia is a newer language that looked like a perfect fit for the investing team for a number of reasons: Speed. 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. I interviewed at Betterment in Feb 2021, 3 weeks total, (4 if you make it to final onsite, each interview occured on a separate week) Here's how they did it. In the first post of this series we mention one of our principles,Standardize the Pipeline. Before I began my internship, I had never worked on a Web app before. The Julia library we built for this purpose serves around 18 million requests per day, and very efficiently at that. To meet these needs, we created Blazer, an extension of the Backbone router. Ship It Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. On the way out, GSON would re-inflate the JSON back into Java objects, using dummy values for the irrelevant fields, providing us with test inputs ready to be pushed through our system. They had a few questions for me at the end and whiles i was talking they cut me off and said "bye" and just ended the call. 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. Coachwas designed and built with these principles: Standardize the pipelinethere should be one way to test code, and one way to deploy it Test code oftencode should be tested as often as its committed Build artifacts oftencode should be built as often as its tested so that it can be deployed at any time Be environment agnosticartifacts should be built in an environment-agnostic way with maximum portability Give consistent feedbackthe CI output should be consistent no matter the language runtime Shorten the feedback loopengineers should receive actionable feedback as soon as possible Standardizing CI was critical to our growth as an organization for a number of reasons.