Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? Lets say that each account holds $50,000, for a total of $150,000 in investments. LinkedIn question - Architect the LinkedIn home screen (feed) for the mobile app. 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). Assuming a User has many Documents then we would change our controller to the following: Now any document_id that doesnt exist in the users object graph will raise a 404 and weve provided authorization for this endpoint without a framework - easy peezy. A web request was made, code was executed, and by enqueuing a job, we said we'd eventually do something. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. From this experience, there are three very important things that Ive learned. Other Improvements We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. (Legal helpfully reviewed these principles months ago, but then I had my first child, and, as you can imagine, priorities shifted.) This new pattern will make building out newer and even more sophisticated features easier, so we can focus on encapsulating the business logic once. With a solid plan for gathering user input, we pivoted to the bigger question: Where should we use a customers preferred first name? I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. This is made possible, at least in part, by the ability to perform units of work asynchronously. These include authentication, view rendering, selecting an http response code, redirecting, and setting cookies. Lets say that his Roth IRA holds $2,750 of VTI, and $2,750 of VWOB. Explore open roles Passion for change. 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? Additionally, we can use things like ActiveRecord to make these fake responses even more realistic based on the data stored in our actual database. Reports available to the entire office were next. Customers looking to fine-tune their desired annual savings and retirement age in real time would have to wait for our server to respond to each scenariothose added seconds become noticeable and can impair functionality. And this is precisely why, at Betterment, we start each application off with a database-backed queue, co-located with the rest of the apps data, with the guarantee of at-least-once job execution. There was the feature work stream which involved: Storing the users new name information. We wanted to maintain the same format as the new failure messages for consistency and ease of reading. chicken:3.000lbs(3.0instock) carrots:0.632lbs(2.0instock) thyme:0.000lbs(6.0instock) onions:0.000lbs(4.0instock) noodles:5.000lbs(9.0instock) garlic:0.000lbs(0.0instock) parsley:0.000lbs(1.0instock) 16.000lbsofchicken. Each consists of some action being taken for / by / on behalf of / in the interest of one or more of our customers, and that must be completed within an appropriate amount of time. Heres how we did it. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? Betterment was super supportive and accommodating. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? 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. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? Its no small feat, but we do it by empowering our teams to set goals, own projects, advocate for features, and challenge the status quo of both our industry and our way of thinking. 9.830lbsoffoodfromElaine's. I was on the verge of taking another internship in educational technology, commonly referred to as edtech. But when I got the opportunity to work at Betterment, a rapidly growing company, I had to take it. It's not quite the interactive experience of the Datadog UI, but it's fairly straightforward to fiddle in the UI and then extract the resulting configuration and add it to our config file. 1. The resulting analytical master file was still large, but small enough to fit on a regular MacBook Pro. By the end of the summer, I was working on a tool to check for money launderers and fraudsters. 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. It also really felt like the company was working in good faith the entire process and I definitely took notice. In the end, we want to verify the plumbing of user input and business logic output through as few large specs per feature that we can get away with. Though our contract with projects of different types is standardized, we permit some level of customization. Maintaining a Queue in the Long Run Operating a queue means being able to respond to errors and recover from failures, and also being generally able to tell when things are falling behind. Write characterization tests We also experimented with characterization tests. Interviewer was very friendly and was trying to know about your personality more than any work experience you may have. 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. Creating a tighter feedback loop Even though our move to create an in-house data team was a natural part of our own engineering team evolution here at Betterment, its still something of a risky unknown for most companies. For this reason, we have a robust testing infrastructure and only peer-reviewed, thoroughly-tested code gets pushed through to production. Because integration tests are more expensive to write and maintain than screen tests, we wanted to make sure the flows we were testing were the most impactful. For example, by assuming that any Java library will run thePMDlinter and unit tests in a certain way we can bootstrap a new repository with very little effort. We built an additional package into our monorepo whose sole purpose was to expose an API for our Ruby application, as well as compile that exposed code into a C shared library. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in May 2019. You can read more about this approach here. For example,secreteditorsensitive_coachwhere coach is the name of the repository. Here's how they did it. As developers of financial software on the web, one of our biggest responsibilities is to keep our applications secure. Some javascript questions about scoping and how to build an app. Engineering Jobs at Betterment Building the future of finance The engineering spirit, the drive to craft and build the quality service for our customers that we dream and crave for ourselves, is how Betterment began, and it's how we'll shape the future. When before it could take days or weeks to add a new step to a CI pipeline, now it takes hours of simple code review. However, reimplementing our financial models in a very different language exposed a number of engineering concerns. Julia has excellent support for technical computing and mathematical modelling. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. I recommend going back to LC style questions in the interview or at least have a couple of mock projects ready in several languages similar to the take home test. Now, in our updated portfolio with a more sophisticated way to allocate, we are using a matrix to manage asset weightsand that requires more complex trading logic. 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. Is the authenticated user authorized to operate on the resource in accordance with Rule #1? High Availability inAirflow While Airflow doesnt claim to be highly available out of the box, we built an infrastructure to get as close as possible. In order to effectively work on multiple pieces of an app, an engineer needs to be fluent in multiple different languages. Controllers should pass ActiveRecord models, rather than ids, into the model layer. Secrets are code. A couple of hours of focused conversation defined a six-month tactical focus for the team. One challenge we have that most existing iOS apps share is the need to still support older iOS versions. 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. Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, and iPhone are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. Betterment assumes no responsibility or liability whatsoever for the content, accuracy, reliability or opinions expressed in a third-party website, to which a published article links (a linked website). We use Marionette.js, a framework built on top of Backbone.js, to help us organize our JavaScript and manage page state. Why dont we use Controller Specs? Late one night, we started bouncing ideas off each other on how to pull it off. It made an optimal user experience possible. Their office is ok-ish. If you don't know Ruby + rails, don't bother since it's the only language you're allowed to work with. That tells WebValve what requests to intercept and route to this fake. without the complication of a service boundary). Notifications When we merge our SLO templates into this repository, Coach will manage creating SLO resources in Datadog and accompanying SLO alerts (that ping slack channels of our choice) if and when our SLOs violate their target goals. Were building that at Betterment. Feb 2019 - Present4 years 2 months. Secrets management does NOT mean attempting to write our own crypto libraries or cipher algorithms. So what do we do? As such, information on this page may not be up to date. The solutions that come out of that awareness are game-changing. Even though code reuse presented itself as a win, the larger concerns behind user experience, server lag, and new infrastructure overhead motivated us to rethink our approach, prioritizing the user experience and minimizing engineering overhead. This employer has claimed their Employer Profile and is engaged in the Glassdoor community. 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. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. It is a read-only, star-schema representation of fact and dimensional tables for growth subject areas. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. 2. To facilitate versioning and sharing of our Julia packages internally (e.g. 16.0availableacrossallstores. This is because code in the body of the main function and the bodies of groups only runs once and it does so immediately. For example, a group named when a user is logged in tells me that the group of tests relies upon a user in the authenticated state. I think they said the second one is with a recruiter and there are a few more rounds after. Our Principles in Action: Shortening the FeedbackLoop The feedback loop in the Old World run by Jenkins was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. An example Lets say at the last minute, the Soup Nazi is out to make the biggest batch of soup he possibly can. We find that there is a lot of value in structuring a system spec as an intuitively sensible user story - with realistic user motivations and behavior, sometimes including the user making mistakes, correcting them, and ultimately being successful. All code is peer reviewed and does not go to production if there is not adequate test coverage or if the code is not up to design standards. Making a fake implementation of that plugin is typically as easy as making another class, prefixing its name with Fake and having it implement the public contract of the regular plugin class with suitably real but not quite real behavior. Many of them took the time to draw diagrams and timelines to accompany their explanations. 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. Lets add them to our objective function: is the dollar amount above the target balance in asset class AC. The tests end up looking incredibly simple once all of these things are in place(which was the goal!) We would receive immediate feedback in the CircleCI interface when those jobs ran, and this feedback loop helped us iterate even faster. Im going to take you through our testing journey from a limited native automated testing suite and heavy dependence on manual testing, to trying flutters integration testing solutions, to ultimately deciding to build out our own framework to increase confidence in the integration of our components. With VisiCalc, the first-ever spreadsheet program, in 1979 and Excel in 1987, the business world stepped into two new eras in which any employee could manage large amounts of data. Keep in mind, descriptive group names go a long way in adding clarity to what dependencies that bucket relies upon. Were able to write tests specific to the component without worrying about the use-case or increasing testing time for our apps. With that, weve been able to test the integration of all the components for a given flow, all written in widget-test-like style without needing to build out the entire app. 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. While we encourage candidates to ask questions of everyone they meet, the AMA provides an opportunity to meet with a Betterment engineer who has zero input on whether or not to hire them. However, you asked for themostrewarding, and I would have to say without a doubtthe mentorship. For these things, we are using HTMLdata elements to specify behaviors. Well-tested code stored in version control that could easily be changed and developed. If our service didnt succeed at that goal, the violation overflow called an error budget shows us by how much we fell short. Lets assume we already know that VTI has a higher expected value in Joes taxable account, and that VWOB has a higher expected value in his Roth IRA. Tell me about a time you collaborated at work. So weve established that we dont want to hit external services in tests, which we can do through WebMock or similar libraries. App owners have permissions to assume the secret-editor role for sensitive ecosystems of their specific application. We began with thispull requestto patch the first issuechange the behavior of the cop to recognizerawandhtmlsafeas violations regardless of being wrapped insafejoin. While we didnt run a scientifically valid split-test for the new process versus the old (it wouldve taken years to reach statistical significance), our hiring metrics have improved across the board. But the point is that jobs are never simply dropped, or silently deleted, or lost to the cyber-aether, at any point, from the moment we enqueue them to their eventual resolution. Note that the contribution limits mentioned in this example are as of the time this article was published. 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. We could not only make good decisions for Elaine, Jerry, and Newman, we could make those decisions optimally. However, a user transaction object contains a host of data that isnt relevant to the trades that will eventually be created, and is associated with other objects that are also not relevant. the application or models in question dont have a concept of private data The flagged code isnt actually insecure: e.g. 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. You can find these cops here. For example, a controller that has different authorization restrictions because the actions it is performing are more dangerous might require additional testing. Following their apprenticeship, they joined us as full-time Junior Engineers. In a few anecdotes throughout your talk, you mentioned the importance of having mentors and role models. We wanted to have a test harness that we could use to set up the app under test and the world that the app would run in, however we knew this configuration code would be mildly complicated and something that would be in flux. The process took 7 weeks. For instance, tasks that saturate CPU are best run on a compute optimized worker with concurrency set to the number of cores. 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. Okay, weve got an app, a test harness, and robots to interact with the screens. Give a solid implementation of your solution rather than focusing on the testing/description. Product and DesignMeet the other teammates, 5. This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. 2 Technical interviews, followed by an AMA style lunch and then behavioral interviews for the rest of the day. Use WebValve to define HTTP service fakes and toggle between real and fake services in non-production environments. In each case, once I had a clear solution in mind, we shifted to a laptop set up with IntelliJ to implement and test parts of my solution. We needed a team responsible for collecting, curating and presenting the dataand our data had to be trustworthy for objective metric-level reporting to the organization. (Besides, no one wants to be an adult, right?) But, if Elaine was set up a certain way, we wanted to go back to Jerry and adjust the decisions we made for him. At Betterment, our ultimate goal is to continue developing products that change the investing worldand that starts with data. And we've even written on why we did it. We cannot just assign arbitrarily large values to the decision variables due to two restrictions which cannot be violated: Joe must maintain $11,000 in his taxable account and $5,500 in his Roth IRA. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. The usage pattern is for folks to connect to client_analytics and from there to: cross-query against the betterment_live schema, import/export and manipulate custom datasets with Python or R, perform regression and analysis, etc. We captured a mass of user transaction objects from production for use in testing. Any features youd like to see added? Next, we settled on an algorithm which pays out buckets fairly, and guarantees that the total payments exactly sum to the desired payout. All of these steps, apart from the editing, are transparent to the engineer editing the secret. Phone interview was a typical phone screening some personal questions to make sure your experience matches the role. 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. These are REALLY basic things that you can do if you have some rails experience, but if its your first time looking at it, you're SOL, and your interviewers will at best try to nudge you to the right documentation page to read mid interview. Continuous Delivery (CD) at scale is hard to get right. Answer Example: "As a junior software engineer, I believe the most . 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. Enqueues and Transactions See, theres a major gotcha that may not be obvious from the list of ActiveJob backends. I also pay attention to the use of appropriate design patterns and algorithms . As a Goo. To meet these needs, we created Blazer, an extension of the Backbone router. We talked about my career and what I was looking for. In addition to these two, the Betterlint repository contains other custom cops weve written to enforce certain patterns -- both security related as well as more general ones. The most common type of interview you will encounter. If there was an issue, how did you handle the situation? 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? As an avid saver, Joe quickly reached his annual Roth IRA contribution limit of $5,500. Those interviewers dont fill out a scorecard, and our hiring managers are forbidden from discussing candidates with them. 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. Building for Better: Gender Inclusion at Betterment Betterment sits at the intersection of two industries with large, historical gender gaps. Were not just writing code. While an interview setting may not offer pair programming in its purest sense, our interviewers truly participate in the process of writing software with the candidates. That means the next step was to build a killer testing framework. Sopsorific, also written in Go, makes a few assumptions about application environments. Onboard new applications more quickly. Theres actually a critical security bug here that allows the client to specify any attachment_id, even if they dont own that attachment - eek! Maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration. What inspired you to become a civil engineer? Different approaches are possible. So does the delayed approach scale? From a list of strings, print them out in groups that are anagrams of each other. How is pay, wlb & work culture. 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. 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. One of these things was having an opinionated tool to help us manage secrets helped to make sure we didnt accidentally leave around low-entropy secrets from when we were developing or testing out a feature. Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. https://www.youtube.com/embed/F32QhaHFn1k. Create an input queue: We created a bucket with every simulationmore than 200,000we wanted to run. Cassidy Williams, a software engineer at mobile payments company Venmo, recently came in to speak. These represent integer ranges (entirely orthogonal to queues), and default to interactive (0-9), user visible (10-19), eventual (20-29), and reporting (30+), with default alerting thresholds focused on retry attempts and runtime. More generally, how do we take an inflow of money and allocate it to weighted buckets in a fair, penny-precise way? The first of these issues was that the cop allowed usage ofrawandhtmlsafewhen the usages were wrapped insafejoin. To add a new set of constraints, engineers simply provide an implementation of a TradingConstraintGenerator. According to LinkedIn Dan Kubb started working on 1999, then the employee has changed 7 companies and 5 jobs. To make things simple, lets assume that both portfolios are only invested in two asset classes: U.S. total market stocks and emerging markets bonds. Be the first to find this interview helpful. In the end, we landed on our own flavor of a pair programming interview. 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. 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. What is the interview process like at Betterment? Besides the performance benefits, reading a single system spec from beginning to end ends up being good high-level documentation of how the software is used. Have we violated our error budget every month for the past three months? Jesse Harrelson, a Betterment Software Engineer, not only leads our hosting events, they found a path to Betterment through Women Who Code. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? 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. 2) Small take home problem, mostly about correctly reading requirements and providing an implementation. It also doesnt assist users in acting on the results it gives. 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. While we didnt run a scientifically valid split-test for the new process versus the old (it wouldve taken years to reach statistical significance), our hiring metrics have improved across the board. It needed to be able to organize the different server endpoints (and its data) into models, as well as know how to take those models and render them into views. CI/CD: Standardizing the Interface Meet our CI/CD platform, Coach and learn how we increased consistent adoption of Continuous Integration (CI) across our engineering organization. Friction here refers to ambiguity of CI results and the uncertainty of knowing where your code is in the CI/CD process. And why that's important. The most obvious alternative was a computer, but then many of our engineers expressed concerns with this method, having had bad experiences with computer-based interviews in the past. End-to-end-ish tests using fake HTTP in Flutter, Finding a Middle Ground Between Screen and UI Testing in Flutter, Introducing Delayed: Resilient Background Jobs on Rails, Focusing on What Matters: Using SLOs to Pursue User Happiness, Finding and Preventing Rails Authorization Bugs, Using Targeted Universalism To Build Inclusive Features, Guidelines for Testing Rails Applications, WebValve The Magic You Need for HTTP Integration, Building for Better: Gender Inclusion at Betterment, Shh Its a Secret: Managing Secrets at Betterment, How We Develop Design Components in Rails, Engineering the Launch of a New Brand for Betterment, Reflecting on Our Engineering Apprenticeship Program, Building Better Software Faster with Shared Principles, From 1 to N: Distributed Data Processing with Airflow, A Functional Approach to Penny-Precise Allocation, How We Engineered Betterments Tax-Coordinated Portfolio, The Evolution of the Betterment Engineering Interview, Server JavaScript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App, Modern Data Analysis: Dont Trust Your Spreadsheet. These interviews are in Ruby on Rails - know ruby on rails beforehand, since it is difficult to read / implement on the spot. If you have been using the randomization flag since the inception of your codebase, youre in a fantastic position and can be confident in your tests! In Luigi, we knew when the data was pulled and only then would we trigger a task. 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. The component consists of 3 parts: structure, behavior and appearance. However, recent customer and data growth coupled with new business requirements require us to now scale horizontally with high availability. More on shared examples in the section below. In the simple example above with two accounts and two funds, there are a total of four constraints. 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.