I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2023. Heres what an example Ruby appscoach.ymllooks like: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/2f966ab69ba1c7895ce312aec511aa6b The CLI will refer back to a projectscoach.ymlto decide what kind of CircleCI DSL needs to be written to the.circleci/config.ymlfile to wire up the right jobs to run at the right time. 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. 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. Using Targeted Universalism To Build Inclusive Features The best products are inclusive at every stage of the design and engineering process. This made the problem provably solvable and quick to computeon the order of milliseconds per customer. A few simple questions can facilitate effective security review of a PR that touches a controller action: Who is the authenticated user? A recruiter followed up within two days and we did a call to discuss qualifications. If youve read this far, wed encourage you to take the leap and test out the delayed gem for yourself! But we saw that the right building blocks existed to do what we wanted and proceeded with the confidence that it was theoretically possible. The Evolution of the Betterment Engineering Interview Aug 2, 2016 12:00:00 AM Betterments engineering interview now includes a pair programming experience where candidates are tested on their collaboration and technical skills. 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. Define our process For us the obvious first order of business was to deliver continuous, incremental value and gradual transition from legacy systems to new ones. 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. New York City: $135,000 - $155,000. As a result, in addition to learning how well a candidate can write code, we learn how well they collaborate. Fully-fledged services require infrastructure to run and are (ideally) supported by a full team of engineers. We then moved into a coding problem that involved writing classes to model data and logic to query that data to answer increasingly complex questions. While migrating from Luigi to Airflow is not yet complete, Airflow has already offered us a solid foundation. We liked notifying engineers when a deploy began, but we needed to be more accurate about who we were notifying. And leaving it up to engineers to own their own configuration lets folks modify the file in an unsupported way which could break their CI process. While working, I would take any available time for courses on websites like Codecademy and Team Treehouse. Betterment is an engineering-driven company that has developed the most trusted online financial advisor based on the principles of optimization and efficiency. 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. 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. 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 applied online. Modeling and implementing our portfolio management algorithms using linear programming was not easy, but it ultimately resulted in the simplest possible system needed to reliably pursue optimal after-tax returns. At Betterment, staying compliant with regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, is a part of everyday life. Not only was this frustrating, but it was inefficient. We use Slack, like a lot of other companies, so that part of the messaging story wouldnt change, but there were bugs we needed to fix and design flaws we needed to update. Being able to run our financial models within our customers Web browsers ensures an instant user experience and eliminates any server lag or CPU-concerns. All coding exercises were real world examples, no leetcode or theoretical problem solving questions. 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. Use WebValve to define HTTP service fakes and toggle between real and fake services in non-production environments. In person pair programming was in Ruby only. How is pay, wlb & work culture. We like to evaluate how well a candidate explains the design decisions and progress from one interviewer to the next. Ill just use Betterment. Its exciting to see how Ive developed since I first started attending meetups, and how some of our long-time attendees have grown as engineers and as professionals. Building A Community Of Our Own In 2018, our Women of Betterment group had an idea. Do we try to get that extra 9 in our target - or do we use the time to take some creative risks with the product (feature-flagged, of course)? It's just collecting fake responses and organizing them so that they're easy to access later.As you can see, the internals are pretty tiny. The first step in this translation was to deprecate our not-very-descriptively named #firstname method and push engineers to start using two new, descriptive methods called #legalfirstname and #commonfirstname (#commonfirstname is essentially a defaulting method that falls back to #legalfirstname if #preferredfirst_name is not present for that user). Gabriel Talavera's email & phone number - Senior Software Engineer at 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. The Evolution of the Betterment Engineering Interview Betterments engineering interview now includes a pair programming experience where candidates are tested on their collaboration and technical skills. (Legal helpfully reviewed these principles months ago, but then I had my first child, and, as you can imagine, priorities shifted.) We can do this migration in small pieces. Technical interview (computer science fundamentals), Technical interview (modelling and app design), Ask the candidate to describe a recent technical challenge in detail, Introduce the pair programming problem and explore the problem, Pair programming (optional, time permitting). - Byteboard interview, 2 parter. 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. But, there will also be times when we're running in a local development environment and we want to communicate with a real collaborator service to do some true integration testing. Then, instead of operating one giant queue, well have broken things down to a number of smaller queues, each with their own worker pools, emitting metrics that can be aggregated with almost the same observability story we have today. It's clich, but just getting to know one another and sharing how you feel about certain situations at work is such a great way to empower yourself and empower others. What is legacy code? . We knew that a star schema approach would help us clarify a data narrative and give all of us a consistent view of truth. Were not just writing code. These guidelines constituted our opted out experienceviews that would receive this lightweight reskin immediately but not the full rebrand treatment. Sopsorific bootstraps these KMS keys and IAM roles for a given application. Mastering the Software Engineering Interview | Coursera Furthermore, because of the CPU-intensive nature behind our calculations, heavy bursts of simultaneous customers could compromise a given servers response time. Soon we were solving for our acceptance criteria requirements left and rightthat Java app needs the PMD linter! 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. From 1 to N: Distributed Data Processing with Airflow Betterment has built a highly available data processing platform to power new product features and backend processing needs using Airflow. 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) Finally, convention over configurationif we can load, register, and wire-up a fake based on its name, for example, that would be handy. We used both historic and simulated data because they complement each other in making future-looking decisions: The historical data allows us to include important aspects of return movements, like auto-correlation, volatility clustering, correlation regimes, skew, and fat tails. Jesse Harrelson: I first heard of Betterment by attending the Women Who CodeAlgorithms meetup hosted at HQ. Whenever a change occurs in one system, we can enqueue idempotent jobs notifying the other systems, and retry them until they succeed, or until we are left with stuck jobs that must be addressed operationally. Glassdoor users rated their interview experience at. If youd like, you can skip ahead to the tools before continuing on to the rest of this post. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. Analysis, Model Building, Learning Youll probably only present one or two of the scores of models and variants you build and test. I didn't connect too well with one of the managers in the final round and saw the rejection coming. Betterment Junior Software Engineer Interview Questions How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? The simulated data allows us to generate novel potential outcomes, like market crashes bigger than previous ones, and generally, futures different than the past. I applied online. 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. Companies like Betterment are hiring data scientists and analysts who use software development techniques to reliably answer business questions which have quickly expanded in scale and complexity. Those are stored in a file named .coach/datadog_monitors.yml and look like this: monitors: - type: metric metric: "coach.ci_notification_sent.completed.95percentile" name: "coach.ci_notification_sent.completed.95percentile SLO" aggregate: max owner: sre alert_time_aggr: on_average alert_period: last_5m alert_comparison: above alert_threshold: 5500 - type: apm name: "Pull Requests API endpoint violating SLO" resource_name: api::v1::pullrequestscontroller_show max_response_time: 900ms service_name: coach page: false slack: false It wasnt simple to make this abstraction intuitive between a Datadog monitor configuration and a user interface. Most of the first call went over background/experience technical interviewers pretty much only cared about the technical question asked. - Phone screen, nice recruiter. While we tried to construct computer science and data modelling problems that led to informative interviews, watching candidates solve these problems still wasnt getting to the heart of whether theyd be successful engineers once at Betterment. We want to be able to define fakes in a single place, so when we add a new one, we can easily find it and change it. 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. Seemed mostly focused on identifying your work style. Betterment is a great company to work for culture wise (as I mentioned) but unfortunately the total comp is not very competitive. So how do we narrow this feature spec down to something like this? To meet these needs, we created Blazer, an extension of the Backbone router. In order to understand our journey, we first have to establish what secrets management means (and doesnt mean) to us. First to make sure the Soup Nazi gets the ratio of ingredients he needs: .40*totalpounds=a1+b1+c1+d1 .12*totalpounds=a2+b2+c2+d2 .08*totalpounds=a3+b3+c3+d3 .15*totalpounds=a4+b4+c4+d4 .15*totalpounds=a5+b5+c5+d5 .05*totalpounds=a6+b6+c6+d6 .05*totalpounds=a7+b7+c7+d7 Then to make sure that the Soup Nazi doesnt buy more pounds of food from one store than he can carry back: a1+a2++a7<=12 b1+b2++b7<=8 c1+c2++c7<=15 d1+d2++d7<=17 We then have to put bounds on all of our variables to say that we cant take more pounds of any ingredient than any store has in stock. If we were willing to accept tight coupling between our services, specifically in their API contracts, we'd be well-served by a tool like Pact. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2021. Chethan Shetty - Senior Software Engineer 2 - LinkedIn 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. What I mean by fake plugins is really simple. Magic ) is only a few lines of code. Lets say that each account holds $50,000, for a total of $150,000 in investments. We built ourCoach CLIinto the Docker images we use in CircleCI and so those Coach CLI commands are available to us from inside the.circleci/config.ymlfile. We focus on writing expressive, fast, and reliable solitary unit tests, some sociable integrated tests of related units, and some "end-to-end-ish" tests. Asking for someones name is simple, but full of assumptions. It needed to: Include many different potential futures Include many different cash-flow patterns Respect path dependence (taxes you pay this year cant be invested next year) Accurately test how the algorithm would perform if run live. Finally, these tests effectiveness is directly related to how we can apply them to reality, so we need to be simplewe want to be able to test and build features without connections to other features. Form small groups: People are more open to talking closely with smaller groups than a large discussion roundtable. We developed the SHARE Series to create an authentic and conversational environment, one where attendees help guide the conversations and future event themes. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. As such, information on this page may not be up to date. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. We created an open-source project called Blazer to work as an extension of the Backbone router. With sopsorific, secrets for the non-sensitive zone can be made accessible to a broader subset of the app team than sensitive zone secrets helping to eliminate some of bottleneck issues weve experienced with our previous workflow. Were always iterating on our solutions, so if youre interested in expanding on or solving these types of problems with us, check out ourcareer page! Weve pushed the aforementioned nuisance and complexity into our data pipeline (ETL) process and are able to synthesize atomic and summary metrics in a format that is more intuitive for our business users. The registry is a separate Github repository, and we use tooling from theRegistrator.jlpackage to register new versions. Sops encrypts and decrypts your secret values using your cloud providers Key Management Service (AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault) and PGP as a backup in the event those services are not available. All the new features were working on for customers with multiple accountsbe they Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), taxable investment accounts, trusts, joint accounts, or even synced outside accountsrequired this change. Determination of most trusted online financial advisor reflects Betterment LLC's distinction of having the most customers in the industry, made in reliance on customer counts, self-reported pursuant to SEC rules, across all online-only registered investment advisors. The process took 3 weeks. Our engineering team here at Betterment takes security seriously. the trust root chain. Not quite. At Betterment, our ultimate goal is to continue developing products that change the investing worldand that starts with data. For reference, consider the diagram. Using the JavaScript single page app framework, we would need a few things. This systems primary goal is to create.circleci/config.ymlfiles for repositories to encapsulate the necessary configuration for a projects CI pipeline. This would entail a lot of code changes, however, as an engineering team we believe deeply in carving up big endeavors into small pieces. Allow folks outside of the SRE team to contribute to CI. Rails makes escaping contenteasier Rails escapes content by default in some scenarios, including whentag helpersare used. 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. The additional layer of frontend complexity made it even harder for new hires to be productive from day one. Iteration doesnt stop at code. Start with the test Heres a look at what a test would look like to see if a deposit from a bank was initiated: The five lines of code on the bottom is the meat of the test. They look just like widget tests (because they are just widget tests) but they boot up our whole app, run all the real initialization code, and rely on all our real injected dependencies with a few key exceptions (more on that next). Given the formulaic patterns of these bugs, we decided static analysis would be a worthwhile endeavor. In the end, we landed on our own flavor of a pair programming interview. The props are a fancier attr_accessor with the bonus of being able to assign defaults. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2021. It gets you both vulnerable, which helps you build a relationship that can lead to a stronger team overall. Variable server response times do not provide an optimal user experience, especially when performing personalized financial projections. Ultimately, we now know that if people are given a tool to personalize their experience within our product, folks of many different backgrounds will use it. internal services) we have full control over how we build them, so using HTTP and REST is no issue. How did you manage when you were under pressure? Maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration. The simulations were detailed enough to replicate how theyd run in our live systems, and included, for example, annual tax payments due to capital gains over losses, cashflows from dividends and the client saving or withdrawing. We identified two viable alternatives: Build a thin web service that will accept HTTP requests, call the underlying Julia functions, and then return a HTTP response. Cross-Database Replication withDMS We used Luigi to extract and load source data from multiple internal databases into ourRedshiftdata warehouse on an ongoing basis. The entire process was a month long. Tip 2: Keep all initialization & configuration code inside of setUp() methods While it may be tempting to set up certain test objects directly in your main function, this can cause sneaky issues to crop up, especially when mocking or using mutable objects. To help you solidify your understanding of the concepts covered in this course, we have included multiple-choice practice test questions throughout the course. For Betterment, this means working to build a company of passionate individuals who reflect our customers and bring new and different perspectives to our work. The name Betterment jumped out at me on a job listings page because it sounded like it would make my life better. Betterment is a financial technology, or fintech, company; while it provides financial services, its an engineering company at its core. One year later, weve asked them to reflect on their experiences. If an engineer has a monitor tied to metrics or APM, then they just need to plug in the monitor ID directly into our SLO yaml interface. The code in this package is the glue between our pure Julia functions and the lower level library interfaceits responsible for defining the functions that will be exported by the shared library and doing any necessary conversions on input/output. More generally, Lets let be the expected value of holding fund F in account A. Circling back to the original problem, we want to rearrange the holdings in Joes accounts in a way thats maximally valuable in the future. Find out what is missing from the rails app. Aside from partials, there was corresponding styling, or CSS, that was being copied and sometimes changed when these shared partials were altered. 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. She gave a talk on impostor syndrome, a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. This allows the view to be reusable. Bootstrapping is a process by which you take random chunks of historical data and re-order it. Too little testing doesnt give any confidence in system behavior and does not protect against regressions. When reviewing code, I look for adherence to coding standards, code efficiency, readability, and maintainability. Interview with other companies simultaneously. The introduction of the spreadsheet defined the beginning of the business analytics era, but the scale and complexity of todays data has outgrown that origin. The add-to-app boundary was similar. 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. The last straw for using whiteboards came from feedback provided by Betterments Women in Technology group. Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. Betterment Engineering Blog Getting in the habit of asking these questions during code review should lead to more frequent conversations about security and data access. In the end, we landed on our own flavor of a pair programming interview. Note that the error path and two common success paths are exercised in the same spec. 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. "Chethan was a senior to me at the time and was given the role of a buddy-coach to me, when I joined ESKO in the year 2021. After some time, we found ourselves with an application that had a lot of complexity and splintered code practices throughout. Walk me through your design process (in general and part of portfolio). Betterment Interview Questions in New York City, NY In the same vein, we want to be able to answer similar questions about registering fakes in one spot. Its a constant battle to keep things maintainable, readable, testable, and efficient. Simple. As a fellow software engineer, I can personally attest to experiencing this phenomenon in tech, but Ive also heard from friends and colleagues that it can be present in non-technical backgrounds, as well. Lets consider a hypothetical customer account example. Reports available to the entire office were next. I also pay attention to the use of appropriate design patterns and algorithms . All products, services, and content obtained from a linked website are provided as is without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, security, or accuracy. Changing workflows and acquiring new skills is always an investment, but the dividends here are better collaboration, efficient iteration, transparency in process and confidence in the claims and recommendations you make. Betterment interview details: 102 interview questions and 87 interview reviews posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. I applied online. I dragged my chair ten feet across the office and began my new life as the engineering lead of Betterments nascent data teammy new mates included two talented data analysts, a data warehousing engineer and a marketing analyst, also the product owner. The notifications were slightly more nuanced than good/bad, but you get the idea. All of these steps, apart from the editing, are transparent to the engineer editing the secret. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. In the future, expect to read more from our team about how we use our data insights to drive product and growth development at Betterment.