betterment software engineer interview betterment software engineer interview

Some javascript questions about scoping and how to build an app. Their office is ok-ish. Too little testing doesnt give any confidence in system behavior and does not protect against regressions. We quickly realized it was too much. In person pair programming was in Ruby only. Static analysis can help not only with finding existing instances of these vulnerabilities, but also prevent new ones from being introduced. 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. High quality code. You learned how to be talented, dynamic engineers and we reap the benefit. Theres no context to orient us quickly to what the notification is for. We use containers to simulate multiple physical worker machines that connect to officially maintained local Redis and PostgreSQL containers. Defining thesystem Our solution to this problem was to build a system, aCoach CLIfor ourCoach app,designed according toCLI 12-factor conventions. What areas are you looking to grow in? Longer answer: Here at Betterment, we use both. Historically, the team has written code mostly in a research environment, implementing proof-of-concept models that are later translated into production code with help from the engineering team. By the way, this is a topic I could talk about endlessly, so Ill leave it there for now. 5.00% Bringing it all together Hopefully this gives you a taste of the types of problems optimizers can be used for. In certain scenarios, its undesirable to buy or to sell a specific fund because of tax consequences. Did we notice a number of false positives? The biggest problem is that sometimes you're not always sure the original purpose of older code. This leaves our app looking something like this: Given that this is approximately what the app looks like, the test harness needs to grant control of the HttpClient and the ImageCropperService. Other Improvements We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. Server Javascript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App. The last straw for using whiteboards came from feedback provided by Betterments Women in Technology group. 1) Phone screen about the company Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. Not doing it would be bad. Great office dogs. Authorization through Impossibility This principle might feel intuitive, but its worth reiterating that at Betterment we never build endpoints that allow users to access another users data. New York City: $135,000 - $155,000. 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. Next, we settled on an algorithm which pays out buckets fairly, and guarantees that the total payments exactly sum to the desired payout. 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. Check out more error budget math here. This is a rails specific interview, where you get a rails app and you go through it fixing and creating features. I applied online. I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. Another option is to start tracking the level of operational complexity for their systems. Please query for the associated record in a way that enforces authorization (e.g. Besides the performance benefits, reading a single system spec from beginning to end ends up being good high-level documentation of how the software is used. (Were also assuming he only wants to make at most one visit to each store.) Below is an example of one of our components, the flash. Through the magic of libraries. An example Lets say at the last minute, the Soup Nazi is out to make the biggest batch of soup he possibly can. However, in keeping with the company mission to provide smarter investing, it was clear that re-engineering our code was essential to creating a better product. Interview was 30 mins. 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. 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. System specs were added to Rails 5.1 core and it is the core teams preferred way to test client-side interactions. How does it work? For example, customers could set up a Roth IRA with a portfolio of 90% stocks and 10% bonds to save for retirement. Were excited that organizations are already reaching out to collaborate, Emily said. We built an additional package into our monorepo whose sole purpose was to expose an API for our Ruby application, as well as compile that exposed code into a C shared library. - Final interview, stay on one project, swap groups of different interviewers. This type of bug is typically referred to as an Insecure Direct Object Reference vulnerability. This was essentially a map for us engineers to be able to reference and go update those old usages in our codebase whenever we wanted. Good candidates are reports that are updated frequently, require extensive collaboration, or are constantly hung up on discussions over details of implementation or interpretation. At deploy time, the Coach web-app consumes these files and idempotently create Datadog monitors, which can be used as SLIs (service level indicators) to inform SLOs, or as standalone alerts that need immediate triage every time they're triggered. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? Friction here refers to ambiguity of CI results and the uncertainty of knowing where your code is in the CI/CD process. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Before I began my internship, I had never worked on a Web app before. Discussion Finally, weve added an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessionanother idea provided by our Women in Technology group. What did we need? We're not just writing code. 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. Enqueues and Transactions See, theres a major gotcha that may not be obvious from the list of ActiveJob backends. Commercial Customer Service Representative. Combined together we call this aproject_type. They are very specific, testing a small portion of the system (the model under test), and cover a wide range of corner cases in that area. How is pay, wlb & work culture. She and I both live in NYC now, and we see each other regularly at speaking engagements and chat over email about networking and inclusion. 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. Were using AmazonsDatabase Migration Service(DMS) to replace our Luigi-implemented replication solution and re-building all other Luigi workflows in Airflow. Working with our product team, we determined that the minimum amount of change to consider a page rebranded was adoption of the new header, footer, colors, and fonts. But I soon realized it was just the opposite: Knowing less about finance motivated me to learnquickly. 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. Our work consisted of collaborating with our marketing, analytics, and product teams to establish systems and practices that: Measure progress towards high level goals Optimize growth and conversion Support product and project strategy Improve customer outcome A guide to tactical decisions With these requirements in mind, here are some of the tactical decisions we made from the start to get our new data team off the ground. I interviewed at Betterment. This made our results robust to the risk of solely optimizing for the past, a common error in the analysis of strategies. Any questions for me? Being able to run our financial models within our customers Web browsers ensures an instant user experience and eliminates any server lag or CPU-concerns. 1. Flutter provides good solutions for both screen testing and UI testing, but what about the middle-ground? Using UJS patterns, our view can live completely on the server. If our acceptance criteria change, because everything is written in code, adding a new job involves a simple code change and a few tests, and thats it. This is meant as an introduction to using one specific solver as a way to model and solve a problem. On the other hand, some methods are just a means for us to mark content as already safe. In future posts I will be tempted to wax technical and provide more color on the choices weve made and why. Everyone was very open about what they thought about the company and about what their experience at the company was like. Secured rank among top 15 in letsgrowmore summer of code, won first place in Diversion 2022, among top 3 mentors in . To add a new set of constraints, engineers simply provide an implementation of a TradingConstraintGenerator. 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. Fully-fledged services require infrastructure to run and are (ideally) supported by a full team of engineers. 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. If we attempted to deploy this code, RuboCop would fail the build, preventing the code from going out while letting reviewers know exactly why. Before working at Betterment, I didnt think finance was relevant to me. How did you manage when you were under pressure? Do This will correctly print A,B,C,A,D,E (A prints twice because setUpis run before each test) Tip 3: Scope test objects as closely as possible to the tests that need them In the same way that we prefer to keep shared state as low in the Widget tree as possible, keep your test objects close to the tests that utilize them. In just a few weeks, Betterment is launching an updated portfolio -- one that has been optimized for better expected returns. While new products can often be achieved using our existing engineering abstractions, TCP brought the engineering team a new level of complexity that required us to rethink how parts of our portfolio management system were built. This is where SLOs come in. How did we doit? Interview with other companies simultaneously. Our team is passionate about our mission: making people's lives better. Everyone from Betterment is proud of the company and work they have done there, which made my decision not join really difficult. A little bit of color on each, starting with HTTP and REST. I started applying to every bootcamp scholarship I could find and received a full scholarship to Flatiron School. This article is part ofEngineering at Betterment. 4 Betterment Staff Software Engineer interview questions and 1 interview reviews. Total of 6 interviews (phone and in person) I also pay attention to the use of appropriate design patterns and algorithms . Today: A Better Interview Heres our revised interview process: Resum review Initial phone screen Technical phone screen Onsite: Technical interview 1 Ask the candidate to describe a recent technical challenge in detail Set up the candidates laptop Introduce the pair programming problem and explore the problem Pair programming (optional, time permitting) Technical interview 2 Pair programming Technical interview 3 Pair programming Ask-Me-Anything session Product and design interview Hiring manager interview Company executive interview While an interview setting may not offer pair programming in its purest sense, our interviewers truly participate in the process of writing software with the candidates. without the complication of a service boundary). Given the changes in Rails and the limitations of controller specs, weve changed our stance. Basically give intros, talk about your experience and what youre looking for. 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. Using Targeted Universalism To Build Inclusive Features The best products are inclusive at every stage of the design and engineering process. With this blank slate in front of us we were able to iterate quickly by manually adding different jobs and steps to that file. Every component is on brand and consistent with every other app, feels polished, high quality and requires lower effort to implement. Ship It If your mobile iOS app also displays sensitive information and uses Touch ID for biometry-based local authentication, join us in making the easy adaption to delight your users with full support for Face ID on the iPhone X. One Massive Monte Carlo, One Very Efficient Solution We optimized our portfolio management algorithms in six hours for less than $500. When I started my engineering internship at Betterment, I barely knew anything about finance. The solution we came up with is called charlatan and it's open-source and available on pub.dev. For reference, consider the diagram. I applied online. Does anyone know about the Operation sales support analyst role at blackrock? Additionally, we wanted an integration that we could spin-up quickly and with low ongoing cost; theres some fixed cost to getting a FFI-embed working rightbut once you do, its an exceedingly low cost integration to maintain. This can be accomplished by establishing a secure session on the server and running what you would normally run to get a console with the sopsorific run command. These hard-working and talented individuals spend a large portion of their time developing models, researching new investment ideas and maintaining our research libraries. This blog post discusses the different responsibilities of these types of specs, and other related high level guidelines for specs. Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. We use Python more for data pipeline processes and R more for modeling, analyses, and reporting. Some ecosystems are ephemeral and some are durable, but there is only one true production ecosystem holding sensitive PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and that ecosystem must be held to a higher standard of access control than all others. Any improvements you've brought to your current team? We look forward to continuing to build upon Airflow and contributing back to the community. Test, repeat, test. We now rely on Rubocops Rails/OutputSafety cop (instead of our custom cop) to help ensure that our team is making good decisions about escaping HTML content. Can you speak to some techniques that have personally proven effective for you in overcoming impostor syndrome? Engaging The Tech Community At Large At Betterment, were working to creating change in the tech industry and bringing women into our space. App owners have permissions to assume the secret-editor role for sensitive ecosystems of their specific application. Coding challenge and Sys design. Phone interview was a typical phone screening some personal questions to make sure your experience matches the role. Since we believe strongly in our users right to say no, resolving this design issue was the primary reason we prioritized shipping this update. The last of our requirements was to be able to launch into a specific feature rather than having to navigate through the whole app. Three years ago, in 2014, we implemented Touch ID support as an alternative to using PIN entry in our iOS app. 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. What to Use, and How Short answer: R or Python. That code should take me from the raw data to the conclusions. Generating these constraints that ultimately determine buying and selling decisions can often involve tricky business logic that examines a variety of data in our system. From this experience, there are three very important things that Ive learned. Well dive more into system spec best practices in a future blog post. Currently, our Web application is a JavaScript single-page app that uses a frontend MVC framework, backed by a JSON api. The bottlenecks in business analytics had been the speed of human arithmetic or the hours available on corporate mainframes operated by only a few specialists. In the end, we landed on our own flavor of a pair programming interview. 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. Easy and comprehensive testing. Even with this plan, migrating a highly complex web application isnt easy. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? Finally, we will share some tactics for enabling data scientists to be more collaborative and presentational with their R or Python visualizations. According to LinkedIn Dan Kubb started working on 1999, then the employee has changed 7 companies and 5 jobs. Algorithm Interviews. Store results in central location: We used another Amazon Cloud service called S3 to store the results of each simulation. But this article is not about the relative merits of these popular modern solutions. The problem with this is that whenraworhtmlsafeare used to mark content as already safe by putting it in aSafeBufferas is,safejoinwill not actually do anything additional to escape the content. In the process of adopting sops and building sopsorific, we discovered the welcoming community and thoughtful maintainers of sops. They dont need to define an error budget policy, and they dont need to take action when they fail their aspirational SLO. If you have been using the randomization flag since the inception of your codebase, youre in a fantastic position and can be confident in your tests! Our Principles in Action: Shortening the FeedbackLoop The feedback loop in the Old World run by Jenkins was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. For Java apps and libraries we run integration and unit tests by default as well asPMDas part of our static code analysis. A Short History of Data in Business First, a step back in the business time machine. Isnt resilience a basic feature of every backend, except maybe the test/development ones? We had a few options: Rewrite the JavaScript in a way that makes it simpler and easier to use. As a result, we had to build features into sopsorific to allow vendor provided secrets that didnt meet the sopsorific standards by default to be accepted by sopsorifics checks. To ensure true randomness, always pass random as the seed. Changing the objective function and adding new constraints needed to be easy to do. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. Screening with HR, Call with hiring manager, case study, 3-4 hours of interview with the team and other members (each 30 minutes). 40.00% 4.800lbsofcarrots. The variables were solving for are put into a single list. 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. the initialization happens to take a parameter whose name ends in _id but it doesnt refer to a unique identifier for any objects In both these cases, the developer should feel empowered to either rewrite the line in question or locally disable the cop, both of which will prevent the code from being flagged. Legacy code can take a long time to properly test and remove. But what happens when our workers are busy with other work during a deploy? Its only been about three decades since companies started using any kind of computer-assisted data analysis. Graceful WorkerShutdown Upon each deploy, we useAnsibleto launch new worker instances and terminate existing workers. 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. 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. Lets say weve defined some SLOs and notice they are falling behind over time. We use cutting-edge technology to build cutting-edge technology. If there was an issue, how did you handle the situation? Eventually, we could explore ways of feeding jobs through to higher performance queues downstream, far away from the database-backed workers. We left this outside of application code so that teams can modify SLO target goals and details without having to redeploy the application itself. We use SitePrism to abstract away bespoke page interactions and CSS selectors. We turned toAirflowbecause it has emerged as a full-featured workflow management framework better suited to orchestrate frequent tasks throughout the day. Its a spectrum. Why (And How) Betterment Is Using Julia Betterment is using Julia to solve our own version of the two-language problem." I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2021. Isolating New Code with ActionPack Variants ActionPack variantsprovide an elegant solution to rolling out significant front end changes. I have been interviewing Software Engineers for over 25 years and in my current role as CEO of Solution Street, I conduct, on average, two interviews a week. And then were back to square one. An Example As a simple example, lets say we want to edit a users home address. Questions were in JavaScript, ruby on rails, and React having to implement specific features into a pre developed app. In order to build this, we needed to do two overhauls: 1) Build a new CI pipeline and 2) Build a new CD pipeline. Most of the first call went over background/experience technical interviewers pretty much only cared about the technical question asked. Create 1,000 worker instances: With Amazon Cloud Service, we signed up to access time on 1,000 virtual machines. Heres the optimal solution: Managing Engineering Complexity Reaching the optimal balances would require our system to buy and sell securities in Joes investment accounts. It needed to be able to organize the different server endpoints (and its data) into models, as well as know how to take those models and render them into views. We realized that the dependency graph of repository projects project jobs was complicated enough that we would need to recreate the entire.circleci/config.ymlfile whenever we needed to update it, instead of just modifying the YAML file in place. 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. The process took 3 weeks. Maybe we need to reevaluate the metrics were collecting, or perhaps were okay with setting a lower target goal because there are other targets that will be more important to our customers. Get started with your Free Employer Profile. For instance, tasks that saturate CPU are best run on a compute optimized worker with concurrency set to the number of cores. Writing end-to-end tests is pretty expensive. Weve achieved our goalweve allowed for all the functionality of integration without the threats of actual integration. 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. We leveraged ActionPack variants built into Rails and feature flags from TestTrack in new ways, ensuring we didnt need to make any architecture changes. Dropping observations is also one of the easiest ways for two people doing similar analyses to reach different conclusions. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? Betterments promise to customers rests on our ability to execute. Whats missing? 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. Helping people do whats best with their money requires providing them with responsible security measures to protect their private financial data. 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.