This Is How You Bootstrap a Data Team Data alone is not enoughwe needed the right storytellers. Happy paths are non-exceptional flows (flows not based on bad user state or input). Authorization through Navigability Rule #1: Authorization should happen in the controller and should emerge naturally from table relationships originating from the authenticated user, i.e. 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. You are viewing a web property located at Betterment.com. It took eight hours a day of working on a personal finance product for me to notice that the iceberg was even there. It is notoriously hard to estimate the complexity of a task when it needs to be built into or on top of a legacy system. Deadnaming is when, intentionally or not, you refer to a trans person by the name they used before transitioning. 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. Coming in with experience in only Java, this was definitely a challenging project to tackle. This made the problem provably solvable and quick to computeon the order of milliseconds per customer. View Gabriel Talavera's email address: gxxxxxxxa@betterment.com & phone: +1-xxx-xxx-8082's profile as Senior Software Engineer at Betterment, located in Los Angeles, California. . That said, we still relied heavily on the manual testing checklist to ensure the user experience was as expected. 16.0availableacrossallstores. But a scaled engineering org presents other challenges that could just as easily put the goal out of reach. The process took 2 weeks. Theyd attended a number of networking and connection events, and the events never felt quite right. 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. I happened to be in the market, but I had a rush timeline as I already have few offers on the table and need to made a decision within a week. 1. 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) The umbrella term observability covers all manner of subjects, from basic telemetry to logging, to making claims about longer-term performance in the shape of service level objectives (SLOs) and occasionally service level agreements (SLAs). I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. My experience this summer has been invaluable, and I will be returning to school with a brand new view on software development and what a career in this awesome field will be like. Optimal portfolio management requires managing a portfolio in real-time, including taxes, rebalancing, risk, and circumstantial variables like cashflows. Simply put, weve asserted that the sum of the balances of every fund in Joes taxable account must remain at $11,000. When we set up a new plugin and we wrap it in a class that we inject into our app. Three years ago, in 2014, we implemented Touch ID support as an alternative to using PIN entry in our iOS app. Six months ago, I packed up my travel-sized toothbrush kit, my favorite coffee mug now filled with pens and business cards, and a duffel bag full of gym socks and free conference tee-shirts. All the info I provided is given to you at the time of the interview. Create an input queue: We created a bucket with every simulationmore than 200,000we wanted to run. In order to build this, we needed to do two overhauls: 1) Build a new CI pipeline and 2) Build a new CD pipeline. While we could achieve high availability with Luigi, its now 2017 and the data engineering landscape has shifted. It also gave me a good view on what's day to day work is like. Betterment Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions We need to be able to have the library active when running tests or doing local development, but do not want to have it running in a production environmentif it remains active in a real environment, it might affect real customer accounts, which we cannot afford. Any questions for me? Ill just use Betterment. Engineering the Launch of a New Brand for Betterment In 2017, Betterment set out tolaunch a new brandto better define the voice and feel of our product. I applied online. Firstly, there wasnt a true entry point we could launch the app into because our app is add-to-app, meaning that the flutter code is embedded into our iOS and Android native applications rather than being a pure flutter app runnable from a main.dart entry point. If we receive a request for a URL we didn't define, it will 404. Consider a controller that links attachments to a given document. Sounds simple enough! The most significant engineering challenge in building RetireGuide was turning a complex, research-driven financial model into a personalized Web application. To help us with that, we took things a step further and wrote a wrapper around sops we call sopsorific. Where a widget test will run in a fraction of a second to a second, one of these integration tests will take many seconds. Were using AmazonsDatabase Migration Service(DMS) to replace our Luigi-implemented replication solution and re-building all other Luigi workflows in Airflow. Thirdly, we want to be able to autoload our fakes. And unfortunately, its not possible to run a local service mesh on a laptop without it melting. We built our own internal framework for modeling mathematical programs that was not tied to our trading systems domain-specific business logic. What value does a Technical program manager brings to a team? We found the Rubocop community to be welcoming, making only minor suggestions before merging our contribution. Why (And How) Betterment Is Using Julia Betterment is using Julia to solve our own version of the two-language problem." The collaborative environment. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. What resource is the authenticated user operating on? On a related note, the entire company has a collaborative culture that is contagious. Everyone's going mobile! When pursuing this ourselves, we found it valuable to evaluate our testing strategy deficits, identify clear-cut boundaries around what code we wanted to test, and establish standards around what flows through the app should be tested. Explore open roles Passion for change. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. Unfortunately, if it were so simple we wouldnt be here, several paragraphs into a blog post on the topic. We store fake responses with a URI template, a status code, and a body. Any insights would be helpful. without the complication of a service boundary). But in the Old World there wasnt enough context to make the message immediately useful. 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. Total of 6 interviews (phone and in person) Thats why we invest in your growth, constant learning, and a forward-looking career path. Additionally, in CircleCI where we can easily parallelize our test suites, we realized we wouldnt want to notify someone for every chunk of the test suite that failed, just the first time a failure happened for the suite. For example, a controller that has different authorization restrictions because the actions it is performing are more dangerous might require additional testing. So if you can encrypt them safely, you can ship your secrets with your code and have a single change management workflow. In this case, we were able to extract a solution to a complicated problem and keep our OO domain-specific logic clean. It's just collecting fake responses and organizing them so that they're easy to access later.As you can see, the internals are pretty tiny. That usually means that they end up being pretty slow and they tend to be somewhat flaky. They say multiple times that you can come into this job not knowing any rails, and that the interviewers will be accommodating of your background, this is a quarter true. 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. Heres what we came up with: Thanks Coach bot! I applied online. In order to have control over that plugin, this app has also made a thin wrapper service for that. Onboarding a newproject One of the main reasons for standardizing the interface and automating the configuration generation was to onboard new applications more quickly. Additionally, we always deploy multiple baseline Airflow workers in case one fails, in which case we use automated deploys to stand up any part of the Airflow cluster on new hardware. Given requirements, explain how one may model some data. We ran the Monte Carlo simulations over two weekends. Also note, do not get your hopes up if you get a personal call from your recruiter after the final interview. If youve heard one thing about Julia, its probably about its blazingly fast performance. Phone call + take home test prior to onsite. Heavy mocking can make tests harder to read, harder to maintain, and provide less assurance that code is working as expected. Before building anything ourselves, we did some research to figure out what the community had already done. For us, that meant having clear, readable tests that were a joy to write. We were able to overcome this and begin filling out the middle level of our testing pyramid by adding structure on top of the widget testing API that allows us to test full flows from start to finish. We encourage all engineers who want to add to their own CI pipeline to make changes on a branch from ourCoachrepository, where all the configuration generation magic happens, verify its effectiveness for their use-case, and open a pull request. If one team member is on vacation you have to wait to set up an interview with them as well. We wanted to have a test harness that we could use to set up the app under test and the world that the app would run in, however we knew this configuration code would be mildly complicated and something that would be in flux. Relieving Launch Day Stress with Feature Flags Embarking on this rebrand project, we wanted to keep our designs under wrap until launch day. They test the beginning to end workflow of a particular feature, verifying that the different components of an application interact with each other as intended. straightforward interview process, the Betterment apprenticeship quickly . Well only be notified if, over 7 days or 30 days or even longer, they exceed the target goal weve defined for our service. Were far from perfect, but this is what were doing to embrace the International Womens Day charge and work toward better gender balance at Betterment and in our world. For example, we follow a set of pragmatic design principles drawn from SOLID (also created by Michael Feathers) to help ensure code quality. We wanted to maintain the same format as the new failure messages for consistency and ease of reading. The technical portions were not difficult and didn't need much preparation beyond what I would do normally at work. Then, a group of engineers from each squad began tackling each deprecation one by one. Onboard new applications more quickly. HR screen followed by a technical phone screen and final round. But we do believe strongly that theres more to agree about than our industry has been able to establish so far. Therefore, to make sure we limit chicken to 40% of the overall ingredients, one element of the constraints tuple will be, {'type':'ineq', 'fun':lambdax:sum(extract_ingredient_specific_pounds(x,chicken))(calc_total_pounds_of_food(x)*.4)} Making sure the soup nazi is able to carry everything back from the store: 12a1a2a7>=0 17d1d2d7>=17 Leads to, {'type':'ineq', 'fun':lambdax:max_per_store[store]np.sum(extract_store_specific_pounds(x,store))} Hopefully this gives you enough information to make sense of the code example. Supporting Face ID on the iPhone X We look at how Betterment's mobile engineering team developed Face ID for the latest phones, like iPhone X. So what do we do? More generally, how do we take an inflow of money and allocate it to weighted buckets in a fair, penny-precise way? And when my decision making got bogged down at the end he didn't try to hassle me with silly deadlines. This rule is applicable for all controller actions and is a critical component of our security story. This general propertythe ability to enqueue jobs safely and ensure their eventual resolutionis the core feature that we have optimized for. This employer has claimed their Employer Profile and is engaged in the Glassdoor community. Awesome, now that we have an app and a harness we can use to test it, how are the tests actually written? In sops, weve found a tool that combines all of these things enabling a workflow that makes secrets management easier. Exception handlingconveying unhandled exceptions across the FFI boundary is generally not possible. Commercial Customer Service Representative. In our view, or the page where we write our HTML, we would write the following to render what you see above: Heres a breakdown of how that one line, translates into what you see on the page. And leaving it up to engineers to own their own configuration lets folks modify the file in an unsupported way which could break their CI process. First, we needed to decide what pieces of code we were interested in testing and which parts we were fine with stubbing. Alternatively, stick to only interviewing candidates who know Ruby. Legacy code can take a long time to properly test and remove. Lets add them to our objective function: is the dollar amount above the target balance in asset class AC. Faking it left as much of our code as possible under test. Teams without versioning are constantly asking questions like, Did Jim send the latest file?, Can I be sure that my teammate selected all columns when he re-sorted?, or The bottom line numbers are different in this report; what exactly changed since the first draft? These inefficiencies in collaboration and uncertainties about the calculations can be deadly to a data team. If we were willing to accept tight coupling between our services, specifically in their API contracts, we'd be well-served by a tool like Pact. To process registration events, we maintain a registry server on an EC2 instance provisioned throughTerraform, so updates to the configuration are as easy as running a single `terraform apply` command. By hosting meetups for Women Who Code, a non-profit organization that empowers women through technology, were working to engage this community directly. These restrictions require us to allow for some portfolio driftsome deviation from the target allocation. A web request was made, code was executed, and by enqueuing a job, we said we'd eventually do something. 4. It leaves the variable name in plain-text while only encrypting the secret value itself and supports YAML, JSON, or binary format. I switch between 80s music, Broadway show tunes, Christian music, and classical music. Really good! Then there was the foundational work stream, which involved mapping out and addressing every single depreciation. On the other end of the spectrum there are no tests at all; YOLO, just ship-it. Members break out and solve problems together, sharing and honing skills, while building community and support. Manual updates to this file allow the configuration for infrequently-modified projects to drift. We can collectively build and share a body of interrelated principles driven by insights that our industry as a whole hasnt yet realized or is just beginning to understand. 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. To do this, we can relate the terms with the terms using linear constraints. From a design standpoint, executing a preferred name feature was pretty straightforwardwe needed to provide a user with a way to share their preferred name with us, and then start using it. So well need to consider carefully! Too tough to call. The client needs to know almost nothing. Simple. When a PR is merged, our team takes care of redistributing the new version of the library so engineers can update their configuration. 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. Its a constant battle to keep things maintainable, readable, testable, and efficient. This includes validations, instance and class method inputs and outputs, Active Record callbacks, and other model behaviors. This can make scheduling difficult, but in a city as competitive as New York is for engineering talent, weve found it valuable to get to the final offer stage as quickly as possible. The reply completion closure ofevaluatePolicy(_:localizedReason:reply:) This made testing from the iOS Simulator a viable option for gaining a reasonable degree of certainty that our application would behave as expected when running on a device, thus allowing us to prepare a build in advance of having a device to test on. Finding and Preventing Rails Authorization Bugs This article walks through finding and fixing common Rails authorization bugs. In other words, what purpose do these background jobs serve? Note that association does not imply authorization, and the onus is on the developer to ensure that associations are used properly. Building on at-least-once guarantees If we know for sure that well fully execute all jobs at least once, then we can write our jobs in such a way that makes the at-least-once approach reliable and resilient to failure. While working, I would take any available time for courses on websites like Codecademy and Team Treehouse. The optimization package were using in this example, pythons scipy.optimize, provides a very expressive interface for specifying all of those bounds and constraints. Ruthe Farmer - I first met Ruthe back in 2010 during my senior year of high school when I won the Illinois NCWIT Aspirations Award. Because this was entry level, experience with specific languages were not required and interviewers were very helpful with syntax as long as you knew what steps were needed to solve the problem. 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. Everyone was really nice and thoughtful and genuinely wanted to know about me. Building Diversity And Inclusion At Betterment Change starts at the heart of the matter. Versionable Code versioning frameworks, such as git, are now a staple in the workflow of most technical teams. What I mean by fake plugins is really simple. 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). 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. 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. We decided to tackle it using a tab-by-tab approach. Changing the objective function and adding new constraints needed to be easy to do. 44.0availableacrossallstores. 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. Were excited to share the approach we took to incorporating it into our stack and the challenges we encountered along the way. But first, in order to explain how Betterment arrived where we did, we must explain what it is that we need our job queue to be capable of, starting with the jobs themselves. They showed me how we were getting quite a few requests from trans customers to quit deadnaming them. 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. Perhaps wed want to generalize the approach even further. In fact, sometimes it was hard to even know where to start to make changes. So lets take our feature spec. A recruiter followed up within two days and we did a call to discuss qualifications. Platforms that introduce compatibility problems between versions and save their data in proprietary formats may limit access to your own work even if you are paying for the privilege. I will also share our vision for an Event Narrative Data Warehouse and how we are leveraging start-up friendly partners such as MixPanel for real-time event processing, funneling, and segmentation. Who are your biggest inspirations in the industry? Below is an example of one of our components, the flash. Phone interview was a typical phone screening some personal questions to make sure your experience matches the role. Overall, I got the impression their interview process is very focused on cultural fit and enthusiasm for the product more than anything else. Lets talk about why you chose Betterment. We also split the main programming portion of our original interview into separate sections with different interviewers. model initialization, find calls, etc). This works well from a development perspective, but we soon faced the question of how best to integrate this code with our production code, which is mostly developed in Ruby. 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. 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. Start with the test Heres a look at what a test would look like to see if a deposit from a bank was initiated: The five lines of code on the bottom is the meat of the test. Take a minute and review this controller - what jumps out to you? So the string option was appealing to us, but that workflow didnt have the best editing experience as it required multiple steps in order to encrypt a value, insert it into the correct file, and then export it into the environment like the12-factor appmethodology tells us we should. Good candidates are reports that are updated frequently, require extensive collaboration, or are constantly hung up on discussions over details of implementation or interpretation. Visualization, Reporting Careful, a trap is looming. Here's how we turned a request for more inclusion into a feature all Betterment customers can benefit from. Any features youd like to see added? Examine the following types of interviews you may encounter during the software engineer hiring process to help you better prepare: Phone screens The phone screening portion of a software engineer interview usually begins with a brief conversation with a recruiter. 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. AWS Regions do resilience right. This meant there was minimal test environment setup. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. Thirdly, we don't want to have shared code across service boundaries. High Availability inAirflow While Airflow doesnt claim to be highly available out of the box, we built an infrastructure to get as close as possible. It was built out over the past few years, with many different paradigms and patterns. It's a joke feed, but they have some great tech and security points and articles shared there.
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