Here's what our API looks like and how we use it to set up a fake HTTP client for our tests. Using Targeted Universalism To Build Inclusive Features The best products are inclusive at every stage of the design and engineering process. Yet busy with data projects we were feeling the pain ourselves. To answer that question, Ill leave you with one last takeaway. 1) Phone screen about the company Consider the following controller: So long as a user is authenticated, they can perform the show action on any document (including documents belonging to others!) That's what we do here at Betterment, come join us! To do this, we can relate the terms with the terms using linear constraints. If you are new to one or both of these environments, it can be daunting to sort through all of the tools and figure out what does what. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? Beautiful, practical design. Here Id like to discuss some philosophical approaches to defining SLOs, explain how they help with prioritization, and outline the tooling currently available to Betterment Engineers to make this process a little easier. Find out what is missing from the rails app. With Pact, you create a contract file based on the consumer's expectations of an API and you share it with the provider. You may have noticed that unlike the previous example, the vulnerable code doesnt directly reference a params.permit call or any of the parameter names, but the code was still flagged. The contract files themselves are about the syntax and structure of requests and responses rather than the interpretation. 3. A couple of hours of focused conversation defined a six-month tactical focus for the team. There are plenty of other features that weve built that havent made it into the delayed gem quite yet. 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. Worse yet, its impossible to remember exactly what youve done in a point and click environment, so doing it the same way again next time is a crap shoot. And here weare! Then there are outliers Yet sometimes even the best practices still didnt apply to a piece of legacy code. These are some of the most popular tools in each language organized by their layer in your full-stack analysis workflow: Full Stack Analysis R Python Environment RStudio iPython / Jupyter, PyCharm Sourcing Data RMySQL, rpostgresql, rvest, RCurl, httr MySQLdb,requests, bs4 Cleaning, Reshaping and Summarizing data.table, dplyr pandas Analysis, Model Building, Learning see CRAN Task Views NumPy, SciPy, Statsmodels, Scikit-learn Visualization ggplot2, ggvis, rCharts matplotlib, d3py, Bokeh Reporting RMarkdown, knitr, shiny, rpubs IPython notebook Sourcing Data If there is any ambiguity in this step, the whole analysis stack can collapse on the foundation. But so is reliability and performance. Reports available to the entire office were next. What resource is the authenticated user operating on? Anything that didnt get a new, rebranded template stayed in the world of plain old production. It also really felt like the company was working in good faith the entire process and I definitely took notice. 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. 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. I applied, heard back, interviewed, and was rejected within a 2 week time frame. We were also feeling the classic pain points of a growing team contributing to a single application. It is bootstrapped (sampled in chunks) to help generate potential futures. Now that weve wrangled our CI process and encoded the best practices into a tool, were ready to tackle our Continuous Deployment pipeline. 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. Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. Onboarding new hires familiar with the Rails framework will be faster, and those who arent familiar can find great external (and internal) resources to learn it. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. Colorado: $175,000 - $190,000. More critically, the one-off script solution wasnt stored in source control, therefore it wasnt tested. When I started my engineering internship at Betterment, I barely knew anything about finance. See your immediate impact on our company. Exception handlingconveying unhandled exceptions across the FFI boundary is generally not possible. Weve gotten such an enthusiastic response about designing future events around issues that women (and everyone!) Building those small, tight-knit groups promotes relationships that can help the company over time. Here's how they did it. We wrote tests around the methods in question. There are only two security zones per GitHub repositorysensitive, and non-sensitiveeven if there are multiple apps in a repository. Google question - Design an access card system. In the case of service level indicators (basically metrics collection), the Coach CLI provides commands that generate yaml files to be stored in GitHub alongside application code. Upon gem installation, we fetch the Julia source and compile it as a native extension. A Short History of Data in Business First, a step back in the business time machine. So how do we narrow this feature spec down to something like this? It is a historical archive and is not intended to be updated. 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. Its only been about three decades since companies started using any kind of computer-assisted data analysis. Touch ID evaluation prompt displaying the localized reason While Face ID does not seem to make a use of that localizedReason string during evaluation, without the privacy string the iPhone X will run the applications Local Authentication feature in compatibility mode. We arent getting rid of all the JavaScript in our application. This gives us a class in a conventional location that inherits from WebValve::FakeService. Can you speak to some techniques that have personally proven effective for you in overcoming impostor syndrome? For example, a task computing all of a prior days activity executed at midnight would be inaccurate if Redshift were missing data from DMS at midnight due to lag. Test, repeat, test. Their office is ok-ish. Tour of the office + on-site pair programming after successful take home. And our platform needed to grow along with it. 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. Once a new registration event is received, the registry server opens a pull request to the Julia registry. the trust root chain. Ensure the same set of acceptance criteria is in place for all codebases in the org. In the near term, look for smaller pieces of the analytical workflow which would benefit especially from the efficiencies of reproducible, programmatic analysis and reporting. They accomplished that by hiding the users legal name in a dropdown accordion that is toggled closed by default. We did this by providing well-defined interfaces that give engineers access to core system data needed to generate our model. How To Choose A Job Framework The delayed rubygem is a fork of both delayed_job and delayed_job activerecord, with several targeted changes and additions, including numerous performance & scalability optimizations that well cover towards the end of this post. 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. First, how would we want to make a test harness for this app? Variable server response times do not provide an optimal user experience, especially when performing personalized financial projections. Our principles are a living document in an actual git repository that well continue to add to and revise as we learn and grow. This leads to less test setup and fewer tests per model to establish confidence that the code is behaving as expected. Consistency is key, said Jesse. All teams at Betterment are responsible for teasing apart complex financial concepts and then presenting them in a coherent manner, enabling our customers to make informed financial decisions. This allows us to encapsulate both the need to use an iOS 11 compiler flag and the need to callcanEvaluatePolicy(_:error:)on an instance ofLAContextbefore accessing itsbiometryTypeproperty into a single calculated property: See the Gist. The messaging that happened for failures when you merged a pull request into master was a little different in that it included mentions for the relevant contributors (maybe all of them, if we were lucky! In order to effectively work on multiple pieces of an app, an engineer needs to be fluent in multiple different languages. I started reading Robert Shillers Finance and the Good Society, a book my dad recommended to me months earlier. We solve problems from different angles. The CLI handles notifications, artifact generation, and deployment triggers. Companies should strive for a fair balance between adding new features and refactoring legacy code, and should establish a culture where thoughtful code design is a priority. I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. If youre the first convert, absolutism is probably not the right approach. To use a Seinfield analogy, the decisions we would make for Jerry had an effect on what the best decisions were for Elaine. Every situation is different and if you are unsure what the appropriate test coverage is for a particular feature, start a discussion with your team! Interviewers were professional throughout. Whose Twitter feed do you religiously follow? How We Develop Design Components in Rails Learn how we use Rails components to keep our code D.R.Y. We leveraged ActionPack variants built into Rails and feature flags from TestTrack in new ways, ensuring we didnt need to make any architecture changes. 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. I got a very upbeat and cheery sounding email to schedule the call, and my heart was pounding as I waited, and then I was met with a rejection. School has taught me nothing. Can we talk about why you decided to become an Engineer? If you havent, theres no better time to start than now. Then, we need a route in our frontend for navigating to this page. Check out more error budget math here. These views can also leverageRails view yieldfunctionality when needed. 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. . As developers of financial software on the web, one of our biggest responsibilities is to keep our applications secure. To keep the momentum going, we needed to transition towards a service-oriented architecture that would allow the engineers of different business units to run in parallel against their specific business goals, creating even more demand for repeatable solutions to service integration. Just keep an eye on it. But were getting into pretty uncharted territory here, and, as always, your mileage may vary! Its a spectrum. We cant split a penny into fractions, so we cant give your college savings fund the exact proportional amount. 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. How to remove legacy code During our portfolio optimization, we had to come up with a framework for dealing with pieces of old code. We implemented a local fallback mixin for Airflow maintained hooks that uses the local filesystem for development and testing, deferring to the actual hooks remote functionality only on production. This concept is oft-quoted in Julian circles and is perfectly exemplified by the previous workflow of our team: Investing Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) write domain-specific code thats solely meant to serve as research code, and that code then has to be translated into some more performant language for use in production. From a high level view I essentially split this large engineering lift into two different streams of work. Distributed workers used with AmazonsAuto Scaling Groupsallow us to automatically add and remove workers based on outstanding tasks in our queues. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? These arent necessarily true-to-form SLOs but engineers can use this framework and tooling provided to collect data around how their systems are operating and have conversations on prioritization based on what they discover, beginning to build a culture of observability and accountability Conclusion Betterment is at a point in its growth where prioritization has become more difficult and more important. Each file was also named algorithmically to allow us to refer back to it and do granular audits of each run. Dynamicism. Personal finance is not something many college students think aboutpartially because its not taught in school and partially because we dont have any money to worry about anyway. First, I needed to provide a translation of my own understanding of legal first names and preferred first names to our codebase. AWS Regions do resilience right. Unfortunately, our google-fu was bad and we didn't find anything until after we went and implemented something ourselves. Not only was this frustrating, but it was inefficient. They also give background on the role and team structure. Second, flutter_driver is more about UI/E2E testing rather than integration testing, meaning wed need to run an instance of the app on a device, navigate to a flow we wanted to test, and then test the flow. Good candidates are reports that are updated frequently, require extensive collaboration, or are constantly hung up on discussions over details of implementation or interpretation. 3) 6 hour onsite. Enter, end-to-end-ish tests (patent pending ). The tests end up looking incredibly simple once all of these things are in place(which was the goal!) This new flexible set of asset allocations significantly affects our current trading processes. We then pivoted to investigating Flutters newer replacement for flutter_driver: integation_test. Non app owners have the ability to assume the secret-editor role for non-sensitive ecosystems only. High quality code. We use cutting-edge technology to build cutting-edge technology. Thats a lot of time we can reasonably not react to failures. In short, our devs needed to be able to run individual services in isolation; by default they were set to communicate with one another, meaning an engineer would have to run all of the services locally in order to work on any one service. To illustrate, lets suppose youre a Betterment customer with three different accounts: a Roth IRA, a traditional IRA, and a taxable retirement account. There, we have built in automated testing that resolves the version of the package that is being tested, looks up any reverse dependencies of that package, resolves the compatibility bounds of those packages to see if the newly registered version could lead to a breaking change, and if so, runs the full test suites of the reverse dependencies. Needless to say I definitely wish I could stay and work with Betterment rather than going back to school next week, but todays society is under the strange impression that a college degree is important, so I guess Ill finish it out. Betterment engineers (l-r): Arielle Sullivan, J.P. Patrizio, Harris Effron, and Paddy Estridge We recently changed the way we organize our major business objects. 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. 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. I have always been interested in technology. 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. A good agile team member with 3+ years of Software QA Engineering experience offering a profound understanding of Software Testing Life Cycle and test methodologies to improve systems' performance through implementing effective long-term QA integration strategies.<br><br>Tech Experiences:<br><br>- Proficient in Java programming language.<br>- REST API testing using Postman and REST Assured<br . The collaborative environment. How likely is it that youll spot a copy-paste error at row 403,658? We supportwordpress_app,java_library,java_app,ruby_gem,ruby_app, andjavascript_libraryfor now. We talked about my career and what I was looking for. Write some jobs, pick a queue backend with a few desirable features (priorities, queues, etc), run some job worker processes, and were off to the races! At first glance the places where we used #firstname in-app seemed minimalemails, in-app greetings, tax documents. 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. Really good! We cannot assign Joe more money than he already has, nor can we move money between his Roth IRA and taxable accounts. Because widget tests aren't typically run on a real device or a simulator/emulator, they run in a context in which we should assume the underlying platform doesn't support using real plugins. We find each integer quotient and remainder by multiplying the inflow by the weight and dividing by the total weight. Interviews are now more prescriptive regarding non-technical questions. 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. Dont write the same test three times - for example, it is unnecessary to have a model spec, request spec, and a system spec that are all running assertions on the business logic responsibilities of the model. We Scrum, we Git, and we Jenkins. If we merged code into a tracked brancha branch that multiple engineers contribute to, like masterfor one of our biggest repos, which contained 20 apps and 20 test suites, we would be notified at every transition: every rubocop failure, every flakey occurrence of a feature test. Some of the topics that came up were - implementing a http endpoint, writing code to make a rspec pass, active record operations. You will need to be passingly familiar with the language they're using. One might say that this is the primary goal of any webappto provide a set of HTTP endpoints that reliably handle all the success and failure cases within a specified amount of time, and that dont topple over under high-traffic conditions. Heavy mocking can make tests harder to read, harder to maintain, and provide less assurance that code is working as expected. For example, 99.9% of requests complete with a 2xx, 3xx or 4xx HTTP code within 2000ms over a 30 day period The service level indicator (SLI) in this example is a request completing with a status code of 2xx, 3xx or 4xx and with a response time of at most 2000ms. We know it has some sort of network interactions for fetching profile info and posts as well as for posting images and editing a profile. I knew I had a lot to learn about how it all works, but I never imagined that it involved as much as it does. 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. safejoinescapes the content and returns aSafeBuffer(a String flagged as safe) containing it. Instead, we automated the test setup by building tools that could snapshot our input data as of the time the error occurred. My advice to candidates, interview with them but dont keep all your eggs in one basket. I was shocked! Coming in with experience in only Java, this was definitely a challenging project to tackle. 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. This increased our computing power by a thousandfold, and buying time is cheap on these machines. 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. The sample code below illustrates how we generated the constraints for our model. Instead, each worker acts independently. The process took 2 months. Not even knowing we didn't do it very bad. Common stages of the interview process at Betterment according to 99 Glassdoor interviews include: 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. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. The process took 7 weeks. Junior Software Engineer interview questions play a vital role in the job search process. 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. If there was an issue, how did you handle the situation? Finally, to bolt this on to an IRL application, we need the ability to define fakes incrementally and migrate them into existing integrations that we have, one by one. Lots of STAR method and cultural fit questions. But I soon realized it was just the opposite: Knowing less about finance motivated me to learnquickly. For Betterment engineers, it meant restructuring the underlying portfolio data model for increased flexibility. We found the Rubocop community to be welcoming, making only minor suggestions before merging our contribution. To get each amount, take the ratio of the contribution from your normal paycheck to the total of your normal paycheck, and multiply that by your bonus. By only using the server as a JSON API, the frontend needed to know exactly what to do with that JSON. They were honest and straight shooter, got a good sense of the mainly good and bad working at Betterment. 4.0availableacrossallstores. Phone call + take home test prior to onsite. While this will certainly work for this particular example, enforcing that the portfolio allocation is exactly on target when determining optimality turns out to be too restrictive. We recently put some code into production that uses an optimizer to cut down on the amount of code were maintaining ourselves, and it turned out to be pretty darn cool. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? We can be confident that the right people are notified at the right time because we wrote code that does that and we tested it. All the info I provided is given to you at the time of the interview. If you had prior experience with these languages the problems are easy to solve. By going down the path of integration testing, weve been able to increase confidence in everyday changes as well as map out a plan for eliminating our manual test cases. Solution Street has been evolving. When a test case cares about the specifics of a response, it can override that default. This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. Make a feature or two. Sometimes, it's a good idea to think outside the box in order to strike the right balance of test coverage, confidence, and maintainability. For example, they think theyre frauds, or unqualified for their jobs, regardless of their achievements. Well, we aim to find an affordable, maintainable spot on that testing spectrum a la Justin Searls' advice. If you had prior experience with these languages the problems are easy to solve. Limit disruption while we build To limit disruption to our colleagues while delivering incremental improvements, we implemented a clever and completely practical transition plan within MySQLs native feature set. What does the future hold? Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? I applied online. For this problem, we made our initial guess to be what each store had in stock, and we supplied it to the minimize method as a list. Abletocarry17.0pounds. I knew I didnt want to work at a big bank, but I did want to learn more about the industry that employed 16.6% of my classmates at Yale. Final round was 2, 30 minute behavioral & soft skills interviews. Any error budget we set should account for our fiduciary responsibilities, and should guarantee that we do not cause an irresponsible impact to our customers. Testing requires striking a fine balance - we dont want to under-test either. Walk me through your design process (in general and part of portfolio). Menu . The coding question had some nice analogies back to the database Q&A and I got the impression it was a well thought-out phone screen. Building Diversity And Inclusion At Betterment Change starts at the heart of the matter. There's a human conversation and negotiation to be had about these contracts, and you can fool yourself into thinking you don't need to have that conversation if you've got a file that guarantees that you and your collaborator service are speaking the same language; you may be speaking the same words, but you might not infer the same meaning. The big idea: By building empathy and connection among ourselves, we can create an inclusive environment that cultivates innovative ideas and a better product for our customers. Heres how we did it. So, how do we choose where to spend our time? Model Specs Model specs test business logic. From a list of strings, print them out in groups that are anagrams of each other. First round with Hiring Manager and rejected. It might take some time to convince the rest of your organization to receive reports in these more modern formats. Heres simple way to resolve our bug: Now before we create a new AttachmentLink, we verify that the attachment_id specified actually belongs to the user and our code will raise a 404 otherwise - perfect! 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. That usually means that they end up being pretty slow and they tend to be somewhat flaky. 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. Here's how we turned a request for more inclusion into a feature all Betterment customers can benefit from. It is a read-write schema to which our colleagues have full privileges. In this case, our fourth bucket and second bucket, respectively, are most deserving. This is a great way to get a good signal while reducing unnecessary noise.

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betterment software engineer interview