Got the first interview in about 3 weeks. I applied, heard back, interviewed, and was rejected within a 2 week time frame. Create an input queue: We created a bucket with every simulationmore than 200,000we wanted to run. At Betterment, were usingJuliato power the projections and recommendations we provide to help our customers achieve their financial goals. To do good data work today, you need to use a system that is reproducible, versionable, scalable, and open. I found coding super similar from a composition and structure perspective, which allowed me to tap into the creative side of coding. safejoinescapes the content and returns aSafeBuffer(a String flagged as safe) containing it. First, we configure out test suite to use WebValve with the RSpec config helper require 'webvalve/rspec'. 3) 6 hour onsite. We still want to maximize our objective function V. However, with the introduction of the drift terms, we want every dollar allocated toward a single fund to incur a penalty if it moves the target balance for that funds asset class below or above its target amount. When requested through the Local Authentication framework, the biometry evaluation either succeeds or fails separate from any given state of an application. A little bit of disclaimer here before we start digging in a little more: I can barely scratch the surface of how solvers work. Abletocarry17.0pounds. Optimal portfolio management requires managing a portfolio in real-time, including taxes, rebalancing, risk, and circumstantial variables like cashflows. If we say that, a1=poundsofchickenpurchasedfromElaines a2=poundsofcarrotspurchasedfromElaines a3=poundsofthymepurchasedfromElaines a7=poundsofparsleypurchasedfromElaines b1=poundsofchickenpurchasedfromGeorges c1=poundsofchickenpurchasedfromJerrys d1=poundsofchickenpurchasedfromNewmans Were looking to maximize, a1+a2+a3+b1++d7=totalpounds We then have to throw in all of the constraints to our problem. - Phone screen, nice recruiter. My responsibilities are to develop new functionalities, bug fixing, maintaining and deploying production and staging applications. To clarify the hierarchy of how we thought about CI, here are the high level terms and components of ourCoach CLIsystem: There are projects. Our engineering team here at Betterment takes security seriously. Asking for someones name is simple, but full of assumptions. Growing up, I watched my dad work as an electrical engineer. 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. To answer that question, Ill leave you with one last takeaway. 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. 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. Finally, to bolt this on to an IRL application, we need the ability to define fakes incrementally and migrate them into existing integrations that we have, one by one. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? 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) In the rack app, we define the routes we care about for the things we normally would have stubbed in the tests. 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. Google question - Design an access card system. As such, information on this page may not be up to date. Fidel Severino: Im originally from the Dominican Republic and moved to the United States at age 15. Lots of STAR method and cultural fit questions. 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. I applied online. If the service doesnt work as intended, no user (or engineer) will be happy. However, in more complex testing scenarios, this dependency wont be as obvious. These questions are designed to test your knowledge and understanding of prompt engineering and will also be useful for interview preparation if you are seeking a role as a prompt engineer. But, if Elaine was set up a certain way, we wanted to go back to Jerry and adjust the decisions we made for him. As our team has grown impressively from five to more than 50 engineers (and this was just in the last three years), weve significantly improved our abilities to make clearer hiring decisions, as well as shortened our total hiring timeline. Our systems are generally stable, and feature development is paramount to business success. If the service doesnt work as intended, no user (or engineer) will be happy. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2023. While migrating from Luigi to Airflow is not yet complete, Airflow has already offered us a solid foundation. The flag takes a seed that can be one of two things, either a 32 bit unsigned integer or the word random. Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. 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. Ensure the same set of acceptance criteria is in place for all codebases in the org. Dealing With the Uncertainty of Legacy Code To complete our portfolio optimization, we had to tackle a lot of legacy code. 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. Overall, I got the impression their interview process is very focused on cultural fit and enthusiasm for the product more than anything else. Yet busy with data projects we were feeling the pain ourselves. The entire CI and CD process happened as a series of interwoven Jenkins freestyle jobs. Keeping Our Code Base Simple, Optimally Betterment engineers turned regulatory compliance rules into an optimization problem to keep the code base simple. As a Goo. When a PR is merged, our team takes care of redistributing the new version of the library so engineers can update their configuration. Its no longer just a script that sometimes works and sometimes doesnt. After this process, I am a fan of Betterment. I made sure to keep in touch because I would be interning in the Bay Area, where shes located, and weve been chatting ever since. For instance, is the dollar amount above the target balance in emerging markets bondsthe asset class to where VWOB belongs. The solutions that come out of that awareness are game-changing. Julia ticks the box for this requirement as well by using ajust-in-time compilerthat accommodates both interactive and non-interactive workflows well. Our team learned a lot, but a few key takeaways come to mind. Took about an hour or two total. For example, a controller that has different authorization restrictions because the actions it is performing are more dangerous might require additional testing. 2. This algorithm is called theLargest Remainder Method. AWS KMS doesanchoredencryption right. This database is a complete, real-time, read-only replica of our production database. Building and maintaining the worlds largest independent robo-advisor requires a world-class team of human engineers. All interviewers were very nice and easy to talk to, one of the better interview experiences while searching for an entry level role. 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. We came up with a few rules to design this part of the system: Let the author knowas soon as possiblewhen something is red but dont overdo it for redundant failures within the same job (e.g. What to Use, and How Short answer: R or Python. This forces extra thought and extra conversation in code review to ensure that the usage is in fact safe. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? It also gave me a good view on what's day to day work is like. 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 needed to make decisions at a granular level, test how they affected the big picture, and then adjust accordingly. What behavioral and market shifts can we expect to see from fintech in the next five to 10 years? Platforms that introduce compatibility problems between versions and save their data in proprietary formats may limit access to your own work even if you are paying for the privilege. We also split the main programming portion of our original interview into separate sections with different interviewers. This means that an engineer implementing a change to the model would only need to worry about implementing algorithmic behavior, and not about how to retrieve the data needed to do that. When loading the dynamic library (whether through Ruby-FFI or some other invocation of `dlopen`), make sure to pass the flags `RTLD_LAZY` and `RTLD_GLOBAL` (`ffi_lib_flags :lazy, :global` in Ruby-FFI). Instead, each worker acts independently. But first, lets back up a little and answer a few basic questions. Focusing on What Matters: Using SLOs to Pursue User Happiness Proper reliability is the greatest operational requirement for any service. And how does running millions of them per day help us? Its been an incredible journey, so I sat down with them to hear first hand about their experiences. I had a blast pair programming with 3 engineers, which Im glad to say are now my co-workers! In certain scenarios, its undesirable to buy or to sell a specific fund because of tax consequences. Lets start out by exploring that robot testing technique I mentioned earlier. This manual testing was tedious and time consuming for engineers, whose time is expensive. Well go into contributing to our platform in more detail below. Senior Executive - Software Engineer. All of the above! 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. Normally, this is a process that can literally take years (and may explain why legacy investing services are slow to switch to algorithmic asset allocation and advice.) 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. While new products can often be achieved using our existing engineering abstractions, TCP brought the engineering team a new level of complexity that required us to rethink how parts of our portfolio management system were built. First, we needed to decide what pieces of code we were interested in testing and which parts we were fine with stubbing. 40.00% 4.800lbsofcarrots. These questions open up an entirely different can of worms, one that we would prefer remained firmly sealed. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Walk me through your design process (in general and part of portfolio). You should follow GitLab's example and make Ruby a requirement if you're going to continue your practice of having an onsite where Ruby is the only allowed language. 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. Betterment is an engineering-driven company that has developed the most-trusted online financial advisor based on the principles of optimization and efficiency. Recruiter was great in connecting me with more engineers and managers to get more insight onto the role and culture. Within the boundaries of that principle, we considered multiple interview formats, including take-home and online assessments, and several variations of pair programming interviews. We run millions of these so-called background jobs daily using a SQL-backed queuenot Redis, or RabbitMQ, or Kafka, or, um, you get the pointand weve very intentionally made this choice, for reasons that will soon be explained! During your interview, the interviewer may use your resume and cover letter as a reference to guide questions and additional interview topics. We developed the SHARE Series to create an authentic and conversational environment, one where attendees help guide the conversations and future event themes. The process took 3 weeks. We're not just writing code. YAML does human readable key/value storage right. Variable server response times do not provide an optimal user experience, especially when performing personalized financial projections. Some of these are: Secrets are unguessableShort strings like password are not really secrets and this check enforces strings that are at least 128 bits of entropy expressed in unpadded base64. We use the uri package to support matching templated URLs rather than requiring developers to pass in exactly matching strings for requests their tests will make. What to say when thingssucceed We didnt change the frequency of messaging for successwe got that right the first time around. No matter where they fall on that spectrum, each of these solutions has tradeoffs in its approach. When do we want to give feedback? Tell me about a time you collaborated at work. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. We leveraged ActionPack variants built into Rails and feature flags from TestTrack in new ways, ensuring we didnt need to make any architecture changes. These include authentication, view rendering, selecting an http response code, redirecting, and setting cookies. Here's how we turned a request for more inclusion into a feature all Betterment customers can benefit from. This would be accomplished through the use of dashboards displayed on TV screens inside the office. At first glance, it looks like the developer has taken the right steps to adhere to Rule #1 via the document method and were using strong params, is that enough? Some examples: html_safe: [1] pry(main)> include ActionView::Helpers::OutputSafetyHelper => Object [2] pry(main)> result = hi.html_safe => hi [3] pry(main)> result.class => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer raw: [1] pry(main)> result = raw(hi) => hi [2] pry(main)> result.class => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer safe_concat: [1] pry(main)> include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper => Object [2] pry(main)> buffer1 = hi.html_safe => hi [3] pry(main)> result = buffer1.safe_concat(bye) => hibye [4] pry(main)> result.class => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer safe_join: [1] pry(main)> include ActionView::Helpers::OutputSafetyHelper => Object [2] pry(main)> result = safe_join([hi, bye]) =>

hi

bye