betterment software engineer interview

In practice, that might look something like this: Resulting in a function for which the fact that the underlying implementation is in Julia has been completely abstracted away: Challenges & Pitfalls Debugging an FFI integration can be challenging; any misconfiguration is likely to result in the dreadedsegmentation faultthe cause of which can be difficult to hunt down. 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. I have experience in several different backend/ frontend frameworks, yet rails has some specific quirks, and your interviewers will not help you in this regard, but will simply try to see how you figure out, so they basically force you to google mid interview, and set you on a timer. 4.5 hr virutal onsite - three 45 min tech interviews with 15 - 30 min breaks. To migrate to Airflow, were deprecating our Luigi solution on two fronts: cross-database replication and task orchestration. Also, if database changes are part of the project (e.g. Several rounds of technical and behavioral interviews. Luckily, we can use Rubys powerful metaprogramming abilities to abstract all that awaycreating a declarative way to wrap an arbitrary Julia function which results in a familiar and easy-to-use interface for Ruby developers. However, writing mathematical proofs and small Java codes that complete standalone tasks seems pretty pointless now that Ive experienced the real world of software development. Heres how we did it. Getting to work with talented, smart people who want to make a difference. 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. It also made visibility easier in terms of sharing and communicating different teams SLO definitions across the org. 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. As such, information on this page may not be up to date. This way, if we cant achieve perfect allocation, we have a buffer that we can fillalbeit at a penalty. 1 Betterment Mobile Software Engineer interview questions and 1 interview reviews. 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. Recruiter was great in connecting me with more engineers and managers to get more insight onto the role and culture. Instead, we automated the test setup by building tools that could snapshot our input data as of the time the error occurred. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. The take home and both onsite interview questions were not arbitrary but very practical and relevant to what I'd actually be working on. Performance Review Generator Create a peer to peer review using performance evaluation phrases. Those interviewers dont fill out a scorecard, and our hiring managers are forbidden from discussing candidates with them. Wed shrink the expected results we got from production, then re-inflate and compare them to what our tests produced. What our SRE Team Needed Our design and UX was informed by what our engineers using our platform needed, but Coach was built based on our needs. I applied online. https://www.youtube.com/embed/F32QhaHFn1k. The best way to avoid legacy code is to make a best effort at not writing in the first place. This meant there was minimal test environment setup. I interviewed at Betterment in Feb 2021, 3 weeks total, (4 if you make it to final onsite, each interview occured on a separate week) For example,secreteditorsensitive_coachwhere coach is the name of the repository. We like it because its easy to introduce to a codebase, violations break builds in clear and actionable ways, and disabling specific checks requires engineers to comment their code in a way that makes it easy to surface during code review. Ensure the same set of acceptance criteria is in place for all codebases in the org. Stay tuned. Our custom solution to integration testing After trying flutters solutions fruitlessly, we decided to build out a solution of our own. I didnt know 401(k)s were employer-sponsored. When loading the dynamic library (whether through Ruby-FFI or some other invocation of `dlopen`), make sure to pass the flags `RTLD_LAZY` and `RTLD_GLOBAL` (`ffi_lib_flags :lazy, :global` in Ruby-FFI). Similarly, were also asserting that the sum of the balances of VWOB across Joes accounts must be equal to the remaining half of his total balance. (Besides, no one wants to be an adult, right?) I was also invited back the following week to speak with another product person and the CTO. She and I started emailing and video chatting each other during my senior year of college, when I started working with her on the Big Dream Documentary and the International Womens Hackathon at the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Try to organize analyses in a structure similar to how you present them so that the connection from claims to details is easy to make. It does make you feel vulnerable, but it keeps you moving forward. But were getting into pretty uncharted territory here, and, as always, your mileage may vary! 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. To ensure true randomness, always pass random as the seed. We can do this migration in small pieces. When before it could take weeks of both product engineering and SRE time to set up CI for an application or service within a complex ecosystem of bash scripts and Jenkins jobs and application configuration, now it takes minutes. Additionally, all components can take a block, which is typically the content for the component. talked about the company and the role. If we dont escape content properly, we could open ourselves and our customers up to security risks. When requested through the Local Authentication framework, the biometry evaluation either succeeds or fails separate from any given state of an application. Hopefully, it is possible to write unit tests for at least a part of the method's behavior. But so is reliability and performance. We can use our database relationships to ensure that users can only see their own documents. A Redis-based queue will still introduce DB pressure if its jobs execute anything involving ActiveRecord models, and solutions must exist to throttle or rate limit these jobs. We left this outside of application code so that teams can modify SLO target goals and details without having to redeploy the application itself. Take home test was easy and you were allowed to do it in a language of your choosing. NSFaceIDUsageDescription The other difference with Face ID is the newNSFaceIDUsageDescriptionprivacy string that should be included in the applicationsInfo.plistfile. So lets take our feature spec. 2) Small take home problem, mostly about correctly reading requirements and providing an implementation. To avoid this, youll probably want to implement catch-all exception handling in your shared library exposed functions that will catch any exceptions that occur and return some context about the error to the caller (minimally, a boolean indicator of success/failure). In the first post of this series we mention one of our principles,Standardize the Pipeline. In short its a sloppy feature spec. In the end, we landed on our own flavor of a pair programming interview. Explain previous projects We could have attempted to construct a procedural-style heuristic solution to this, but the complexity of the problem led us to believe this approach would be hard to implement and challenging to maintain. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. However, I'm here to tell you (or maybe just remind you) that tests and test coverage aren't the goal in and of themselves. For example, we follow a set of pragmatic design principles drawn from SOLID (also created by Michael Feathers) to help ensure code quality. Maintained and open-sourced by Mozilla, sops is a command line utility written in Go that facilitates slick encryption and decryption workflows by using your terminals default editor. 1. Isnt resilience a basic feature of every backend, except maybe the test/development ones? Onboard new applications more quickly. If our SLOs dont align directly with business objectives and needs, they should align indirectly via tracking operational complexity and maturity. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. Static analysis can help not only with finding existing instances of these vulnerabilities, but also prevent new ones from being introduced. More on shared examples in the section below. We needed a workflow with less of a bottleneck, but allowing every developer access to all the secrets across the organization wasnotan acceptable answer. 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) They should generally give you confidence that a particular model will do exactly what you intended it to do across a range of possible circumstances. Graceful WorkerShutdown Upon each deploy, we useAnsibleto launch new worker instances and terminate existing workers. Ruby on Rails developers have the choice of resque, sidekiq, que, good_job, delayed_job, and now delayed, Betterments own flavor of job queue! 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. Here was a company that wasnt solely focused on the traditional Computer Science education when hiring an apprentice/junior engineer. Were building the future of investing. Knowing this, we decided to focus on happy paths of flows. This owner method for Rails apps results in all logs, error reports, and metrics being tagged with the teams name, and at deploy time it's aggregated by a Coach CLI command and turned into latency monitors with reasonable defaults for optional parameters; essentially doing the same thing as our config-driven approach but from within the code itself class DeploysController < ApplicationController owner "sre", max_response_time: "10000ms", only: [:index], slack: false end For Java apps we have a similar interface (with reasonable defaults as well) in a tidy little annotation. Legacy code can take a long time to properly test and remove. Check out more error budget math here. Solution Street has been evolving. Coachwas designed and built with these principles: Standardize the pipelinethere should be one way to test code, and one way to deploy it Test code oftencode should be tested as often as its committed Build artifacts oftencode should be built as often as its tested so that it can be deployed at any time Be environment agnosticartifacts should be built in an environment-agnostic way with maximum portability Give consistent feedbackthe CI output should be consistent no matter the language runtime Shorten the feedback loopengineers should receive actionable feedback as soon as possible Standardizing CI was critical to our growth as an organization for a number of reasons. 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. Each of those smaller components would be the output of specific functions, and each of those functions would be written in code and be tested. At Betterment, we rely on said jobs extensively, to limit the amount of work performed during the critical path of each web request, and also to perform scheduled tasks at regular intervals. The process took 2 weeks. In building a platform as a service (PaaS), we realized that in order to mitigate the problem ofnurturing pets vs herding cattlewe would need to identify a firm set of acceptance criteria for different runtimes. Here you can see how to construct an instance of the Charlatan class and then use its methods like whenGet to configure it with fake responses that we want to see when we make requests to the configured URLs. The complexity partly arose from the fact that we needed to duplicate business logic from the backend and the frontend. This post is part of series of articles written by Betterments 2013 summer interns. The novelty of our approach was to essentially build partial, precise scaffolding around our current platform. 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. Whats next? Something you did or suggest that would help the team or companies efficiency. Request Specs Request specs test the traditional responsibilities of the controller. Contributing toCI Before, if you wanted to add an additional linter or CI tool to our pipeline, it would require adding a few lines of untested bash code to an existing Jenkins job, or adding a new job to a precarious graph of jobs, and crossing your fingers that it would just work. The addition couldnt be tested and it was often only available to one project or one repository at a time. 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. All of the things that we were testing in controller specs can instead be tested by some combination of system specs, model specs, and request specs. We did it! I applied through a recruiter. Relevant ecosystem. The beginning of our Flutter testing journey Up until early 2020, our mobile app was entirely native with separate android and iOS codebases. sopsorific runis another custom command we built to make our usage of sops seamless. We can also set a warning threshold if we want to be notified earlier when were using up our error budget. Most of the first call went over background/experience technical interviewers pretty much only cared about the technical question asked. 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. 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. Let's imagine a simple social network app, igrastam, that has an activity feed screen, a profile screen, a flow for updating your profile information, and a flow for posting images. However, this doesnt allow us to solve all the things we were working for. Building and maintaining the worlds largest independent robo-advisor requires a world-class team of human engineers. As a computer science major, school has taught me how to code in Java, and maybe some of the theoretical stuff that Ive had drilled into my head will come in handy at some point in my life. Quite a bit more complicated, because each backend framework provides its own set of trade-offs and guarantees, many of which will have far-reaching implications in our codebase. Engineering the Trading Platform: Inside Betterments Portfolio Optimization To complete the portfolio optimization, Betterment engineers needed enhance the code in our existing trading platform. 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. Consider these principles, along with our current and future open source work, part of our contribution to that conversation. Overall, I got the impression their interview process is very focused on cultural fit and enthusiasm for the product more than anything else. Takeaways Testing software is important, but it's not trivial to write a balanced test suite for your app's needs. This increased our computing power by a thousandfold, and buying time is cheap on these machines. Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, I applied online. Implementing the Rebrand without a Spaghetti of IF Statements Our rebranded experience would become the default at launch time, so another challenge we faced was maintaining two worlds without creating unneeded complexity. Striving for Simplicity At Betterment, we aim to build products that help our customers reach their financial goals. 10 Common job interview questions for Civil Engineer. Tests were flakey and we didnt know if it was our Jenkins setup, the tests themselves, or both. System specs were added to Rails 5.1 core and it is the core teams preferred way to test client-side interactions. 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.

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