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. Something you did or suggest that would help the team or companies efficiency. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. My responsibilities are to develop new functionalities, bug fixing, maintaining and deploying production and staging applications. He gave several KTs necessary for the tasks to be done. Betterment Lead Software Engineer Interview Questions Also, I didn't think I would ever say this, but the recruiter I worked with throughout the process was truly amazing. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. They also give background on the role and team structure. Your interview is no different. To illustrate, lets suppose youre a Betterment customer with three different accounts: a Roth IRA, a traditional IRA, and a taxable retirement account. At no point did I feel the pressure thats normally associated with landing a job. Defining thesystem Our solution to this problem was to build a system, aCoach CLIfor ourCoach app,designed according toCLI 12-factor conventions. That means, x=[a1,a2,,a7,b1,b2d7]. Our data workers retain their ability to run existing processes until we can transition them to a better way while the engineering team has successfully expelled business users out of an already busy production environment. In the final Capstone Project, you'll apply your skills to analyze data collected from a real-world (social) network. This gave us the flexibility to switch easily between a variety of third-party mathematical programming solvers. Since the first test will always run before the second test, were not privy to this dependency. While this approach enabled us to reuse our existing R code, it also introduced lag and server performance concerns. Finally, weve added an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessionanother idea provided by our Women in Technology group. The server is responsible for knowing about (1) our data, (2) how to wrap that data into rich domain models that own our business logic, (3) how to render those models into views, and (4) how to render those views on the page. Again, it combines both DelayedJob and its ActiveRecord backend, and should be more or less compatible with Rails apps that already use ActiveJob or DelayedJob. When I started my engineering internship at Betterment, I barely knew anything about finance. 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. However, for failures, we didnt want to sit around for five minutes crossing our fingers hoping that everything was successful only to be told that we could have known three minutes earlier that wed forgotten a newline at the end of one of our files. Take a look at our currently open roles. Modifying our integration with SimonData in order to bulk update our outgoing emails, and Changing how we share a users name with our customer service (CX) team through a Zendesk integration, as well as in our internal CX application. Lots of STAR method and cultural fit questions. Stats: 88% satisfied candidates post-interview; 57% avg. Total of 6 interviews (phone and in person) System specs are more performance intensive than the other spec types, so in most cases we lean towards fewer system specs that do more things, going against the convention that tests should be very granular with one assertion per test. How it works now Now that we knowwhocan do what, lets talk abouthow they can do what they can do. model initialization, find calls, etc). 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. A multi-threaded, SQL-driven ActiveJob backend used at Betterment to process millions of background jobs per day. 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. Fidel Severino: The opportunity to join Betterments Apprenticeship program came via the Flatiron School. Firstly, there wasnt a true entry point we could launch the app into because our app is add-to-app, meaning that the flutter code is embedded into our iOS and Android native applications rather than being a pure flutter app runnable from a main.dart entry point. 2 Betterment Lead Software Engineer interview questions and 2 interview reviews. Friction here refers to ambiguity of CI results and the uncertainty of knowing where your code is in the CI/CD process. Dont Do By keeping test dependencies tightly scoped to where theyre used, we avoid the possibility that a test will be added or changed in such a way that impacts the tests previously consuming the dependency. Jesse Harrelson: I first heard of Betterment by attending the Women Who CodeAlgorithms meetup hosted at HQ. 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. In system specs, each test is wrapped in a database transaction because its run within a Rails process, which means we dont need to use the DatabaseCleaner gem anymore. Any of these might be the topic for a future post, and might someday make their way upstream into a public release! If youre significantly exercising behavior not in the layer youre writing a test for, you might be putting the test in the wrong place. These were our outputs. query: # (total_events - bad_events) over total_events == good_events/total_events numerator: sum:trace.rack.request.hits{service:coach,env:production,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count()-sum:trace.rack.request.errors{service:coach,env:production,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count() denominator: sum:trace.rack.request.hits{service:coach,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count() We love having these SLOs defined in GitHub because we can track who's changing them, how they're changing, and get review from peers. iOS or Android? In addition, Rails has a few methods that provide help in escaping content. 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. In Betterments mobile apps, this means including trustworthy but convenient local authentication options for resuming active login sessions. I interviewed at Betterment. You can find these cops here. For APIs that we build for ourselves (e.g. For example,secreteditorsensitive_coachwhere coach is the name of the repository. How We Built Betterment's Retirement Planning Tool in R and JavaScript Engineering Betterments new retirement planning tool meant finding a way to translate financial simulations into a delightful Web experience. To be more concrete about this, lets define some variables. Upon gem installation, we fetch the Julia source and compile it as a native extension. 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 optimization will be partly driven by a more sophisticated asset allocation algorithm, which will dynamically vary individual asset allocations within the stock and bond basket based on a goals overall allocation. Joes overall portfolio must also maintain its allocation of 50% stocks and 50% bondsthe risk profile he selected. Fidel Severino: Oh man! This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. The focus of our work has been on delivering a platform as a service to make sense of the complex process of CD. Phone call + take home test prior to onsite. It was built out over the past few years, with many different paradigms and patterns. What parameters is the authenticated user submitting? I interviewed at Betterment. Shared code between services creates shared ownership, and shared ownership leads to undesirable coupling. What is an SLO? Its all grounded in developing the best solutions for our customers and helping them achieve financial wellness. See your immediate impact on our company. In the case of mono-repos, if an app in that repository shouldnt have its secrets visible to all engineers who work in that repository, then the app belongs in a different repository. A Functional Approach to Penny-Precise Allocation How we solved the problem allocating a sum of money proportionally across multiple buckets by leaning on functional programming. This is because both of the cops keep a little bit of state to ensure they have the appropriate context necessary when analyzing potentially unsafe function calls. Overall, the process was great. To facilitate versioning and sharing of our Julia packages internally (e.g. Fidel Severino: While working, I would take any available time for courses on websites like Codecademy and Team Treehouse. 10 Common job interview questions for Civil Engineer. (By_Hasan Sir) A component is a reusable code building block. Prior to Betterment, I only had experience with super small codebases that I built myself or with friends. Its also ok to assert that the database was changed in some way in a request spec, but like system specs, there is no need for detailed assertions around object state or business logic. Any insights would be helpful. We were deeply attracted to the idea of being able to fully integration-test our projections and recommendations working within our actual app (i.e. Because we didnt want to run the whole app with these tests in order to keep the tests lightweight enough to run on each commit, we decided to stub out a few problem areas. Our initial task was to interview internal stakeholders to get at their data-related pain points. We sent out questionnaires in advance but collected answers through face-to-face dialogue. If there was an issue, how did you handle the situation? What I mean by fake plugins is really simple. In order to understand our journey, we first have to establish what secrets management means (and doesnt mean) to us. We considered two approaches: (1) Run the existing R code directly server-side, or (2) port our R code to JavaScript to integrate it into our Web application. Use your answer to highlight some of the most important skills for a junior software engineer, along with examples of how you've used those skills in the past. 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. At Betterment, instead of picking pounds of ingredients from a given store, we are using it to piece together a mix of securities, in order to keep us compliant with certain regulatory specifications. 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. Simple. 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. 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. 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. It looks just like our ideal spec from before: We leverage all the power of WebMock and Sinatra through our conventions and the teeniest configuration to provide all the same functionality as before, but we can write cleaner tests, we get the ability to use these fakes in local development instead of the real servicesand we can enable a real service integration without missing a beat. 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. That keeps us moving fast and not breaking things. Well, it was one part versatility of software engineering, one part courage to work in an industry I knew nothing about, and a dash of eagerness to learn as much as I could. Dan Kubb has been working as a Senior Staff Software Engineer for Betterment for 393 days. If embedding your Julia library into a multi-threaded application, youll need additional tooling to only initialize and make calls into the Julia library from a single thread, as multiple calls to `jl_init`will error. 2) Small take home problem, mostly about correctly reading requirements and providing an implementation. We turned toAirflowbecause it has emerged as a full-featured workflow management framework better suited to orchestrate frequent tasks throughout the day. This means that when we naturally hit vertical scaling limits, we could, for example, shard or partition our job table alongside our users table. 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. And then we reached the point where manual changes were hindering our productivity. Weve gotten such an enthusiastic response about designing future events around issues that women (and everyone!) The Problem Proportional allocation comes up often throughout our codebase, but its easiest to explain using a fictional example: Suppose your paychecks are $1000 each, and you always allocate them to your different savings accounts as follows: College savings fund: $310 Buy a car fund: $350 Buy a house fund: $200 Safety net: $140 Now suppose youre an awesome employee and received a bonus of $1234.56. 15 Embedded System Interview Questions (With Answers) Having a tool to protect ourselves from ourselves is vital to our workflow. As good companies tend to do, it began growingnot just in terms of users, but in terms of capabilities. False Positives With any type of static analysis, theres bound to be false positives. alias prod-encrypt="pbpaste | ansible-vault encrypt_string --vault-password-file=~/ansible-vault/production.key" This wasnt the worst setup, but didnt scale well as we grew. A couple of hours of focused conversation defined a six-month tactical focus for the team. 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. Byteboard. We came up with ACES: Automated, Consistent, Efficient, and Self-serviced as the motifs by which we could create a measurable feedback loop. Alternatively, stick to only interviewing candidates who know Ruby. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. 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. Candidates interviewing for Product Manager and Product Designer rated their interviews as the hardest, whereas interviews for Software Engineer and Customer Experience Associate roles were rated as the easiest. This means that your college savings fund gets $382.71, your car fund gets $432.10, your house fund gets $246.91, and your safety net gets $172.84. When we first saw this project on the horizon, we realized it would end up requiring a substantial refactor of our web app. Our CI/CD process invokes this code when it needs to, and it works great. It also doesnt assist users in acting on the results it gives. They dont need to define an error budget policy, and they dont need to take action when they fail their aspirational SLO. Search. Three Things I Learned In My Engineering Internship I knew I had a lot to learn about how a Web app works, but I never imagined that it involved as much as it does. When an input or an assumption changes, it should be as easy as re-running the whole thing. AWS KMS doesanchoredencryption right. The main exception to these guidelines is when your controller is an API controller serving data to another app. We can also set a warning threshold if we want to be notified earlier when were using up our error budget. I started reading Robert Shillers Finance and the Good Society, a book my dad recommended to me months earlier. Then we do the same for the deposit API call. Come work side-by-side with our team, laptops open, and solve problems together. 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. Given the formulaic patterns of these bugs, we decided static analysis would be a worthwhile endeavor. 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. 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. For that, our app has a thin wrapper around the http package called HttpClient. Were using AmazonsDatabase Migration Service(DMS) to replace our Luigi-implemented replication solution and re-building all other Luigi workflows in Airflow. We were able to overcome this and begin filling out the middle level of our testing pyramid by adding structure on top of the widget testing API that allows us to test full flows from start to finish. Uncertainty like this makes it hard to build new and awesome features into a product. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2021. Over time, a handful of these teams formed deviating opinions on what kind of acceptance criteria they had for CI. Our team is passionate about our mission: making people's lives better. Then, we look at the user API callwe define a new route for user, in FakeTrading. The need for new elements in our views is not going to simply vanish because we rebranded, so this makes us more prepared for the future. TL;DRWebValve is an open-source gem that uses Sinatra and WebMock to provide fake HTTP service behavior. And therein lies the rub, because whether or not our job queue is colocated with our application data will greatly inform the way that we write any job-adjacent code. We were tasked with coming up with an algorithm that, at first pass, made me nervous about all the different cases it would need to handle in order to do things intelligently. Being surrounded by a bunch of smart, helpful people has also been super amazing and helped me grow as an engineer. This part will come off as if I'm full of myself, but my tech skills are fine. Reading the AttachmentLink model code, it would be clear that it takes an attachment_id but whether authorization has been handled or not would remain a bit of a mystery. If its a reasonable addition to CI, our thought is that everyone should benefit. Different approaches are possible. provided they know or can guess its ID - not great! Does not reflect any actual portfolio and is not a guarantee of performance. Google Coding Interview With A Normal Software Engineer This test would go on to have a few more steps detailing the interactions on the subsequent screens. 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. We try to avoid testing declarations directly in model specs - well talk more about that in a future blog post on testing model behavior, not testing declarations. This post is part of series of articles written by Betterments 2013 summer interns. 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. Algorithm Interviews. We hone our interview process to ensure youre able to show us your best self. 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. Best Developer Assessment Tools - 2023 - SelectSoftware Reviews
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