We may also have some interactions with native code through a plugin such as image_cropper. This test would go on to have a few more steps detailing the interactions on the subsequent screens. When theres no more work to be had, the worker shuts itself down. - Byteboard interview, 2 parter. Recently, however, weve invested significant resources in modernizing this research pipeline by converting our codebase from R to Julia and were now able to ship updates to our quantitative models quicker, and with less risk of errors being introduced in translation. Testing & Code Review Strategies Rubocop and Rails tooling can only get us so far in mitigating authorization bugs. CPU optimized) to further reduce costs. The novelty of our approach was to essentially build partial, precise scaffolding around our current platform. Every component is on brand and consistent with every other app, feels polished, high quality and requires lower effort to implement. It began with some verbal Q&A about how things like databases and the internet work, along with certain tradeoffs. You should follow GitLab's example and make Ruby a requirement if you're going to continue your practice of having an onsite where Ruby is the only allowed language. 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. Soon we had thought about so many if-statements that they no longer seemed like if-statements, and all the abstractions I was formulating were already leaking. And we need the best to do that. Today, on its first day, were thrilled to announce that the Betterment iOS app fully supports Apples new Face ID technology on the iPhone X. Trusting the SecureEnclave While were certainly proud of shipping this feature quickly, a lot of credit is due to Apple for how seriously the company takes device security and data privacy as a whole. 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. The process took 3 weeks. Our CI/CD process invokes this code when it needs to, and it works great. Model Specs Model specs test business logic. 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. You can find these cops here. How much money do you put in each account? Now that the summer has ended, I have accomplished my goal I created five dashboards displaying charts, numbers and maps with valuable data that everyone can see. In just a few weeks, Betterment is launching an updated portfolio -- one that has been optimized for better expected returns. With python, its helpful to know that we can pull the pounds of food for a particular ingredient out of x, i.e, [a1,b1,c1,d1] with x[ingredient_index::num_of_ingredients] Likewise, we can pull out the ingredients for a given store with x[store_index*num_of_ingredients:store_index*num_of_ingredients+num_of_ingredients] e.g, [b1,b2,b3,b4,b5,b6,b7] For this example, were using the scipy.optimize.minimize function using the NLSQP method. The next thing we needed to decide was what user experiences we actually wanted to test with our integration tests. We like to evaluate how well a candidate explains the design decisions and progress from one interviewer to the next. 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! Explore open roles Passion for change. By hosting meetups for Women Who Code, a non-profit organization that empowers women through technology, were working to engage this community directly. 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)? The last straw for using whiteboards came from feedback provided by Betterments Women in Technology group. Find contacts: direct phone number, email address, work experience. Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, and iPhone are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. Betterment assumes no responsibility or liability whatsoever for the content, accuracy, reliability or opinions expressed in a third-party website, to which a published article links (a linked website). The CircleCI info includes the title of the job that failed (coach_clilint (Gemfile)), the build number (#11389) to reference for context in case there are multiple occurrences of the failure in multiple workflows, a link to the top-level Workflow, and@s for each contributor. Then, a group of engineers from each squad began tackling each deprecation one by one. Though there are many types of specs, in our workflow we focus on only three: model specs, request specs, and system specs. Being that Java only covered a small piece of this structure, I had a lot of languages to learn. Then there was a second round interview with another software engineer, a technical project manager and the director of engineering. I applied through a recruiter. 2 Technical interviews, followed by an AMA style lunch and then behavioral interviews for the rest of the day. Some javascript questions about scoping and how to build an app. Cleaning up the most looked at metrics helped the organization speak to and understand key data in a consistent manner. 32.0availableacrossallstores. 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. Instead of multiple interviewers asking a candidate about the same questions based on their resum, we prescribe topics based on the most important core competencies of successful (Betterment) engineers. Rebranding a feature involved adding new styles to the application_rebrand.css and implementing them in new rebrand view files. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. Make sure that the bulk of the logic youre testing in a model spec is in the method youre exercising (unless the underlying methods are private). While we love the simplicity and flexibility of Backbone, weve recently encountered situations where the Backbone router didnt perfectly fit the needs of our increasingly sophisticated application. And we think we made it a little easier for them (and us) to do just that. In order to effectively work on multiple pieces of an app, an engineer needs to be fluent in multiple different languages. Benefits of measuring the right things, and staying on target The goal of an SLO based approach to engineering is to provide data points with which to have a reasonable conversation about priorities (a point that Alex Hidalgo drives home in his book Implementing Service Level Objectives). What value does a Technical program manager brings to a team? Unlike our original IRA calculator, RetireGuide needed to follow the core product principles of the Betterment experience: efficiency, real-time feedback, and delight. Your interview is no different. Heres an example of the basic directory structure: .sops.yaml app/ |_ deployment_secrets/ |_ sensitive/ |_ production.yml |_ nonsensitive/ |_ default.yml |_ devin_test.yml The security zone concept allows a more granular access control policy as we can federate decrypt permissions on a per application and per security zone basis by granting or revoking access to KMS keys with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles. As the author of this post, my tactful attempt at an answer is that, well, not all queue backends optimize for the specific kind of end-to-end resilience that we look for. 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. I am passionate about making a positive impact on society through the construction of safe . Specifically, we wanted a tight feedback loop between the business and technology so that we could experiment and figure out what worked before committing real dollars to a solutionaka high-frequency hypothesis testing. These were some of the questions we asked ourselves during this part of the design phase. Frameworks Galore! In addition, weve consistently received high marks from candidates and interviewers alike, who prefer our revamped approach. First we add the gem to our Gemfile and run bundle install. Phone interview was a typical phone screening some personal questions to make sure your experience matches the role. Pretty awesome. Not only does this increase test readability (each set up method will set up only the dependencies needed for the tests below it and within the same scope in the testing tree), but this reduces the scope for potential problems. Our goals in standardizing the CI interface were to: Make it easier to distribute new CI features more quickly across the organization. Developers can also run these validations locally: sopsorific check Deployment The application server is configured with the instance profile generated by sopsorific so that it can assume the IAM role that it needs to decrypt the secrets at runtime. In short its a sloppy feature spec. For example, thecharacter is escaped using>, and the&character is escaped using&. Isolate the right information With this abstraction, we were able to isolate the absolute core objects that we need to perform trades, and ignore the rest. 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. By having these changes in version control, each addition to the CI pipeline goes through code review and requires tests be written. We used IronMQ to manage the queue, which allows individual worker nodes to pull inputs themselves instead of relying on a system to monitor worker nodes and push work to them. Suraj Prasad. We store fake responses with a URI template, a status code, and a body. We chose to fake the http client since it is the very edge of our network layer. I moved to Nashville to study songwriting and music business, and started a small label through which I released my bands album. We then pivoted to investigating Flutters newer replacement for flutter_driver: integation_test. 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. 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. From a list of strings, print them out in groups that are anagrams of each other. The focus of our work has been on delivering a platform as a service to make sense of the complex process of CD. One Massive Monte Carlo, One Very Efficient Solution We optimized our portfolio management algorithms in six hours for less than $500. and raise offenses if any of these values get passed into methods that could lead to a vulnerability (e.g. We write our tests, called specs (short for specification) with RSpec and Capybara. Because its in source control and it runs through its own CI process, we can also easily roll out changes to notifications without breaking things. To learn more, we encourage you to watch the below video featuring Betterments Sam Moore, a lead engineer, who reveals the new framework at a Meetup in Betterments NYC offices. Dropping observations is also one of the easiest ways for two people doing similar analyses to reach different conclusions. Meet Blazer: A New Open-Source Project from Betterment (video) While we love the simplicity and flexibility of Backbone, weve recently encountered situations where the Backbone router didnt perfectly fit the needs of our increasingly sophisticated application. 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. Once all of these metrics make it to DataDog, were able to display a comprehensive timeboard that graphs things like average job runtime, throughput, time spent waiting in the queue, error rates, pickup query performance, and even some top 10 lists of slowest and most erroring jobs. 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. 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. We like to extract standard assertions such as ones relating to authentication into shared examples. To learn more about engineering at Betterment, visit the engineering page on the Betterment Resource Center. The most significant engineering challenge in building RetireGuide was turning a complex, research-driven financial model into a personalized Web application. The rebranded version of our applications core layout imported the new CSS file and just like that, we were in business. We find each integer quotient and remainder by multiplying the inflow by the weight and dividing by the total weight. Definitely not my cup of tea. 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. The range listed is just one component of Betterment's total compensation package for employees. Junior Software Engineer interview questions play a vital role in the job search process. Fortunately, it was a fun experience and it really took very little time! This made the problem provably solvable and quick to computeon the order of milliseconds per customer. When I returned to the United States, I worked in the retail sector for a few years. Commercial Customer Service Representative. It leaves the variable name in plain-text while only encrypting the secret value itself and supports YAML, JSON, or binary format. The technical portions were not difficult and didn't need much preparation beyond what I would do normally at work. I had two exceptional mentors who went above and beyond and removed any blocks preventing me from accomplishing tasks. Step 1: Recruiter call and ByteBoard OA. Get better unit or integration tests in place as soon as possible. AWS Regions do resilience right. 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. Without any further ado, here areBetterments Engineering Principles. Plus, even when running in the most durable mode, Redis-based ActiveJob backends tend to dequeue jobs before they are executed, meaning that if a worker process crashes at the wrong moment, or is terminated during a code deployment, the job is lost. Or perhaps the users for a service are Betterment engineers, and its really unclear how that work affects the people who use our companys products. 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. Questions Interviews are now more prescriptive regarding non-technical questions. We found the Rubocop community to be welcoming, making only minor suggestions before merging our contribution. In person pair programming was in Ruby only. Reviewing your professional documents before the interview ensures you're well prepared for questions about skills, previous jobs or educational . The main recurring issue was that hiring managers were left uncertain as to whether a candidate truly possessed the technical aptitude and skills to justify making them an employment offer. Other Improvements We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. After graduation from Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics High School, I completed a semester at Lehman College before unfortunate family circumstances required me to go back to the Dominican Republic.