betterment software engineer interview

Too often, the events involved forced networking and stodgy PowerPoint presentations, with takeaways amounting to little more than a free glass of wine. The SLO is the target percentage, 99.9%. 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. There is no need to test corner cases or very specific business logic in system specs (those assertions belong in model specs). Too tough to call. 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. 6 more interviews with other potential team members. Compile the Julia code into a shared library, and call it directly from Ruby usingFFI. In this case, it meant paring the conditions down to making it work using just rails. Updating the most visible spots in our application. An easy trap to fall into as an object-oriented developer is to get too caught up in the idea that everything has to be an object. The technical portions were not difficult and didn't need much preparation beyond what I would do normally at work. Betterment was super supportive and accommodating. 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. When we set up a new plugin and we wrap it in a class that we inject into our app. 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. 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. and raise offenses if any of these values get passed into methods that could lead to a vulnerability (e.g. If the service doesnt work as intended, no user (or engineer) will be happy. Secondly, we need to define the boundaries in terms of contracts. Contracts are a point of exchange between the consumption side (the app) and producer side (the collaborator service). Very pleasant and friendly experience. You are viewing a web property located at Betterment.com. 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. Suffice it to say, crypto will not be the focus of this post. Wed shrink the expected results we got from production, then re-inflate and compare them to what our tests produced. Accessing the database requires knowledge of SQL, a lot of scripts are written in Python, front end structure and design is written in HTML and CSS, and front end animation is written in javascript. To meet these needs, we created Blazer, an extension of the Backbone router. If we buried the authorization within the model, it would be difficult to ensure that the trust-root chain is being enforced especially if the model is used by multiple controllers that handle authorization inconsistently. Magic ) is only a few lines of code. Tax efficiency is a key consideration of Betterments portfolio management philosophy. This was about 3 hours, 2 - 1 hour paired programming exercises with members of the team, and a 30 minute conversation/soft skills interview with the hiring manager. However, recent customer and data growth coupled with new business requirements require us to now scale horizontally with high availability. This is the second part of a series of posts about our new CI/CD platform,Coach. 10 - 15 min recruiter Q & A - answers any questions about next steps Alongside this manual testing pain, the automated testing in the existing iOS and android codebases was inconsistent. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window, Get started with your Free Employer Profile, The Ultimate Job Interview Preparation Guide. We Scrum, we Git, and we Jenkins. In Luigi, we knew when the data was pulled and only then would we trigger a task. All return examples and return figures mentioned above are for illustrative purposes only. (Essentially, it means keeping our on-call engineers happy.) But were getting into pretty uncharted territory here, and, as always, your mileage may vary! Phone interview was a typical phone screening some personal questions to make sure your experience matches the role. 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. 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. Now that we have our objective function and constraints set up, we just need to solve these equations. 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. Typically, variants are prescribed to help render distinct views for different device types, but they are equally powerful when rendering distinct HTML/CSS for any significant redesign. 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. iOS also had some tests that were flaky, causing CI builds to fail unexpectedly. 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. Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. One of our primary aims in building this platform was to increase developer velocity, so we needed to eliminate any friction from commit to deploy. Additionally, all components can take a block, which is typically the content for the component. All of these steps, apart from the editing, are transparent to the engineer editing the secret. Centralizing architectural decision-making would kill ownership and autonomy, and ensure your best people leave or never join in the first place. At no point did I feel the pressure thats normally associated with landing a job. 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. During our testing, we ran over 200,000 simulations of 12 daily level returns of our 12 asset classes for 20 year's worth of returns. For his recipe he needs a ratio of: 40% chicken 12% carrots 8% thyme 15% onions 15% noodles 5% garlic 5% parsley All of the stores around him only keep limited amounts in stock. This part will come off as if I'm full of myself, but my tech skills are fine. Parting Thoughts on Our Principles Our principles arent permanent as-written. 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. More precisely, when we make use of database transactions (which, when we use ActiveRecord, we assuredly do whether we realize it or not), a database-backed queue will ensure that enqueued jobs will either commit or roll back with the rest of our ActiveRecord-based changes. Final round was 2, 30 minute behavioral & soft skills interviews. Build extra time into project estimates Legacy code can also be tricky when it comes to project estimates. ): The New World is cleaner, easier to grok, and more immediately helpful: The link title to GitHub is the commit diff itself, and it takes you to the compare URL for that changeset. Keeping Our Code Base Simple, Optimally Betterment engineers turned regulatory compliance rules into an optimization problem to keep the code base simple. The contract files themselves are about the syntax and structure of requests and responses rather than the interpretation. What are some specific ways in which companies can contribute to these movements and promote a healthier and more inclusive work culture? The takeaway The biggest lesson to learn from this experience is that, as an engineer, you should not be afraid to take a functional approach when it makes sense. We built a tool (Coach) to make the way that we build and test code conventional across all of our of apps, regardless of language, application owner, or business unit. (Legal helpfully reviewed these principles months ago, but then I had my first child, and, as you can imagine, priorities shifted.) Coding challenge and Sys design. Whos allowed to do what? This may seem less important inside a corporate bubble where everyone has access to the same proprietary platform, but it is at the very least a turnoff to most new talent in the field. Within the boundaries of that principle, we considered multiple interview formats, including take-home and online assessments, and several variations of pair programming interviews. Our Women Who Code meetups become a way to track your progression. Most analyses contain too many important detailed steps to plausibly communicate in an email or during a meeting. 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. I applied online. I identified the most visible spots where we address a user and changed them, but for less visible changes I took this new map and delegated cross-squad ownership of each usage. Optimizing For Resilience Now, you might be thinking, shouldnt all of these ActiveJob backends be, at the very least, safe to use? We use a little command line utility to assume the role and are dropped into a secret-editor session where they use sops to add or edit secrets with their editor in the same way they add or edit code in a feature branch. Every component is on brand and consistent with every other app, feels polished, high quality and requires lower effort to implement. Following the above tips should put you well on your way to fixing existing problems in your test suite or otherwise preventing them all together! We repeated multiple styles and page elements throughout the app to make the experience consistent, but we didnt have a great way to reuse the common elements. Be the first to find this interview helpful. The registry is a separate Github repository, and we use tooling from theRegistrator.jlpackage to register new versions. Weve also covered how our custom cops can help developers avoid antipatterns, resulting in safer and easier to read code. How We Develop Design Components in Rails Learn how we use Rails components to keep our code D.R.Y. Once a new registration event is received, the registry server opens a pull request to the Julia registry. According to Healthline, because legal name changes are expensive, inaccessible, and not completely effective at eliminating deadnaming, institutions like Betterment can and should make changes to support our trans customers. So, your college savings fund would get: (310/1000)*1234.56 = 382.7136 We can do the same for your other three accounts, but you may have noticed a problem. 2. This gives us the confidence that all our code is configured properly, all our dependencies are provided, our navigation works, and the user can tap on whatever and see what they'd expect to see. Jesse Harrelson, a Betterment Software Engineer, not only leads our hosting events, they found a path to Betterment through Women Who Code. Kelly Hoey - I met Kelly at a women in tech hackathon during my last summer as a student in 2013, and then she ended up being on my team on the British Airways UnGrounded Thinking hackathon. We ran the Monte Carlo simulations over two weekends. . By avoiding shared code between services, we force ourselves to have a conversation about every API we build with the consumers of those APIs. When I sat down with them to solicit feedback on our entire hiring process, they pointed to the whiteboard problem-solving dynamics (one to two engineers sitting, observing, and judging the candidate standing at a whiteboard) as unnatural and awkward. In the case of services not performing well over time, the conversation might be focus on improving reliability for service XYZ. But what happens if our users are super happy, our SLOs are exceptionally well-defined and well-achieved, and were ahead of our roadmap? Pretty Easy. First was with 2 members on the team, last was with a manager. Different properties may be provided by a different entity with different marketing standards. Those three principles are: Authorization through Impossibility Authorization through Navigability Authorization through Application Boundaries This post will explore the first two principles and provide examples of common patterns that can lead to vulnerabilities as well as guidance for how to fix them. Gabriel Talavera's email & phone number - Senior Software Engineer at The calculator focuses on just one part of the broader set of retirement calculations, and doesnt have the functionality to automatically import customers existing information. The process took 1 week. This includes validations, instance and class method inputs and outputs, Active Record callbacks, and other model behaviors. I applied through a recruiter. For example,secreteditorsensitive_coachwhere coach is the name of the repository. The add-to-app boundary was similar. Continuous Delivery (CD) at scale is hard to get right. This Is How You Bootstrap a Data Team Data alone is not enoughwe needed the right storytellers. Lets define that objective function. If you're interviewing for a domain-specific role, expect the questions to center around the specific technology you specialize in, such as AWS or cloud infrastructure, or IoT. As an example, consider the following simple Julia function which sorts an array of numbers using theinsertion sortalgorithm: In order to be able to expose this in a shared library, we would wrap it like this: Here weve simplified memory management by requiring the caller to allocate memory for the result, and implemented primitive exception handling (seeChallenges & Pitfallsbelow). For this reason, if you do write characterization tests, we recommend not going too far with them. Were running Airflows database on AmazonsRelational Database Serviceand using AmazonsElasticachefor Redis queuing. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. Notice the two WebMock stub_requests calls at the top. But that leaves us with a pretty large gap where it's way too easy for us to accidentally create a feature that depends on some Provider that's not provided and our app blows up at runtime in a user's hands. To solve this problem, we developed WebValvea tool that allows us to define and register fake implementations of HTTP services and toggle between real and fake services in non-production environments. We recently re-optimized our portfolio to include more complex asset allocations and risk models (and it will soon be available). 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.

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