Recruiter was great in connecting me with more engineers and managers to get more insight onto the role and culture. As shown above, weve asserted that the sum of the balances in funds including U.S. total market stocks (in this case, only VTI), plus some net drift amount in that asset class, must be equal to the target balance of that asset class in the portfolio (which in this case, is 50% of Joes total holdings). This is just one more example of where our quest for efficiencyand your happinesspaid off. We needed a team responsible for collecting, curating and presenting the dataand our data had to be trustworthy for objective metric-level reporting to the organization. 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. 1 Betterment Software Engineer Internal Tools interview questions and 1 interview reviews. This was a wonderful opportunity to practice targeted universalism: a concept that explains how building features specifically for a marginalized audience not only benefit the people in that marginalized group, but also people outside of it, which increases its broad impact. Where a widget test will run in a fraction of a second to a second, one of these integration tests will take many seconds. Asking questions, definitely. If we used a research-first approach to build RetireGuide, the result could have been a planning tool that was mathematically sound but hard for our customers to use. By inheriting from this WebValve class, we gain the ability to toggle the fake behavior on or off based on another conventionally-named environment variable, in this case TRADING_ENABLED. Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. Therefore, we decided to extract our allocation code into a module function. Face ID permissions prompt without (left) and with (right) an NSFaceIDUsageDescription string included in the Info.plist This compatibility mode prompt is undesirable enough on its own, but it also clued us into the need to check for potential security concerns opened up by this forwards-compatibility-by-default from Apple. This employer has claimed their Employer Profile and is engaged in the Glassdoor community. To do this, we used GSON, which lets you convert Java objects into JSON, and vice versa. Your interview is no different. Ill discuss these more below. I work on a real-time customer data platform called the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP . What to say when thingsfail This is what engineers would see in the Old World when tests failed for an open pull request: Among other deficiencies, theres only one link and it takes us to a Jenkins job. Following the principle of least privilege, our engineering team leads are app owners of the specific applications they maintain. This article is part ofEngineering at Betterment. Here was a company that wasnt solely focused on the traditional Computer Science education when hiring an apprentice/junior engineer. We use SitePrism to abstract away bespoke page interactions and CSS selectors. Eventually, we found nock. First was with 2 members on the team, last was with a manager. We have a strong preference to use a single integration pattern for both internal and external service integrations; this reduces cognitive overhead for devs. You want to help others whenever you can; and it has been the case that Ive received plenty of help from others who arent even directly on my team. - Byteboard interview, 2 parter. Memory managementif youll be passing anything other than primitive types back from Julia to Ruby (e.g. 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). Take a look at Blazer. There is no /api/socialsecuritynumbers endpoint because it is a prime target for third-party abuse and developer error. This created a clean separation between the old and new world and protected us against regressions between the two. We decided to allow candidates the choice of using a whiteboard if they wished, but it would no longer be the default method for presenting ones skills. Currently, Julia powers all the projections shown inside our app, as well as a lot of the advice we provide to our customers. We talked about my career and what I was looking for. Option 1 is a very common pattern, and actually quite similar to what had been the status quo at Betterment, as most of the projections and recommendation code existed in a JavaScript service. The Evolution of the Betterment Engineering Interview Betterments engineering interview now includes a pair programming experience where candidates are tested on their collaboration and technical skills. Most analyses contain too many important detailed steps to plausibly communicate in an email or during a meeting. 10 - 15 min recruiter Q & A - answers any questions about next steps I work in Ruby, for example, where the first thing you learn is thateverythingis an object. We use the YAML format because of its readability and terseness. Working closely with Product, Design, Marketing, and Research, we brainstorm, ideate, build, and push our thinking and perspectives. We like it because its easy to introduce to a codebase, violations break builds in clear and actionable ways, and disabling specific checks requires engineers to comment their code in a way that makes it easy to surface during code review. With integration testing being a key level of the testing pyramid, we needed to find a way to test how features in our app interacted without the overhead involved with setting up UI tests. - last_updated_date: "2021-02-18" approval_date: "2021-03-02" next_revisit_date: "2021-03-15" category: latency type: monitor description: This SLO covers latency for our CI notifications system - whether it's the github context updates on your PRs or the slack notifications you receive. Development & Deployment We mimic our production cluster as closely as possible for development & testing to identify any issues that may arise with multiple workers. To solve this programmatically, we adoptedAlembicdatabase migrations to manage these objects through code, allowing us to keep our development, testing, and production Airflow databases consistent. It looks just like our ideal spec from before: We leverage all the power of WebMock and Sinatra through our conventions and the teeniest configuration to provide all the same functionality as before, but we can write cleaner tests, we get the ability to use these fakes in local development instead of the real servicesand we can enable a real service integration without missing a beat. I applied online. I stayed there for several years until last May, when I uprooted my life to New York for Betterment, and I havent looked back since. In system specs, each test is wrapped in a database transaction because its run within a Rails process, which means we dont need to use the DatabaseCleaner gem anymore. Additionally, we can use things like ActiveRecord to make these fake responses even more realistic based on the data stored in our actual database. Instead, we automated the test setup by building tools that could snapshot our input data as of the time the error occurred. Tell us a bit about your life before Betterment. More from Betterment: Server Javascript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App Going to Work at Betterment Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? When loading the dynamic library (whether through Ruby-FFI or some other invocation of `dlopen`), make sure to pass the flags `RTLD_LAZY` and `RTLD_GLOBAL` (`ffi_lib_flags :lazy, :global` in Ruby-FFI). Lets say weve defined some SLOs and notice they are falling behind over time. Along the way, we were able to contribute back to a great community. We escape content primarily to avoid opening ourselves up to XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks. This new map leads us to our second task: addressing those deprecated usages. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. Women Who Code: An Engineering Q&A with Venmo Betterment recently hosted a Women in Tech meetup with Venmo developer Cassidy Williams, who spoke about impostor syndrome. At the time, our application had no established patterns or tooling for the kinds of third-party integrations that customers were increasingly expecting from fintech products (e.g., like how Venmo connects to your bank to directly deposit and withdraw money). We made the decision to maximize the expected after-tax value of a customers holdings after having achieved the minimum possible drift. For example, we follow a set of pragmatic design principles drawn from SOLID (also created by Michael Feathers) to help ensure code quality. "trust-root chaining"). The first round of "in person" interviews. The one additional advantage of integration_test is that it uses the same API as screen tests do, so writing tests with it feels more familiar for developers experienced with writing screen tests. Do no harm to others' work At Betterment, we are constantly pushing through new features and enhancements, some visible to customers, but many not. Why dont we use Feature Specs? The most common type of interview you will encounter. It was a tough decision though, and Betterment really went from middle of the pack to top of my list after I met their team. If you had prior experience with these languages the problems are easy to solve. What kind of monitoring would be necessary to detect such a failure, across all the features of our app, and all the types of jobs it might try to run? When jobs run, they emit ActiveSupport::Notification events that we subscribe to and then forward along to a StatsD emitter, typically as distribution or increment metrics. Moving your organization towards these ideals is likely to be an imperfect and gradual process. One challenge we have that most existing iOS apps share is the need to still support older iOS versions. Relieving Launch Day Stress with Feature Flags Embarking on this rebrand project, we wanted to keep our designs under wrap until launch day. For many trans folks like myself, this is the name assigned at birth which means all legal and government issued IDs and documents use this non-affirming name. The IRA calculator runs primarily in R, computing its advice on a Shiny server. While most of this transition was smooth, there were a few cases where legacy code slowed our progress. Another big resilience failure happens far earlier, during the enqueue step. 17.0availableacrossallstores. Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. 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. My only criticism would be that since I mainly had experience with Eclipse instead of IntelliJ, we wasted a small amount of time fiddling with the controls. Being surrounded by a bunch of smart, helpful people has also been super amazing and helped me grow as an engineer. We decided it was necessary to be told onlyoncewhen everything ran successfully. Controller specs are notably absent from our guide. From a high level view I essentially split this large engineering lift into two different streams of work. Were building a new way of investing to help people live better lives. If an application absolutely needs to be able to show certain data, consider structuring the endpoint in a way such that a client cant even attempt to request another users data. https://www.youtube.com/embed/F32QhaHFn1k. The SLO is the target percentage, 99.9%. On day one, we created a feature flag and started shipping rebranded code to production. 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. 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. Having a tool to protect ourselves from ourselves is vital to our workflow. Though our contract with projects of different types is standardized, we permit some level of customization. First to make sure the Soup Nazi gets the ratio of ingredients he needs: .40*totalpounds=a1+b1+c1+d1 .12*totalpounds=a2+b2+c2+d2 .08*totalpounds=a3+b3+c3+d3 .15*totalpounds=a4+b4+c4+d4 .15*totalpounds=a5+b5+c5+d5 .05*totalpounds=a6+b6+c6+d6 .05*totalpounds=a7+b7+c7+d7 Then to make sure that the Soup Nazi doesnt buy more pounds of food from one store than he can carry back: a1+a2++a7<=12 b1+b2++b7<=8 c1+c2++c7<=15 d1+d2++d7<=17 We then have to put bounds on all of our variables to say that we cant take more pounds of any ingredient than any store has in stock. It does make you feel vulnerable, but it keeps you moving forward. The Soup Nazi should only buy a total of 40 lbs worth ingredients because Elaine, George, Jerry, and Newman just dont have enough chicken. multi-tenancy), team-level job ownership annotations, resumable bulk orchestration and batch enqueuing of millions of jobs at once, forward-scheduled job throttling, and also the ability to encrypt the inputs to jobs so that they arent visible in plaintext in the database. This algorithm is called theLargest Remainder Method. In order to fulfill two of our main requirements: being able to run as part of our normal test suite in CI and having a familiar API, we knew wed need to build our framework on top of flutters existing screen test framework. 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. 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. 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. Part of that commitment includes reflecting the diversity of those customers. We built a tool (Coach) to make the way that we build and test code conventional across all of our of apps, regardless of language, application owner, or business unit. sopsorific runis another custom command we built to make our usage of sops seamless. I came away from the in-person meetings with a strong sense that this would be both a great learning opportunity and an excellent group of people to work with. Whether its a database query, a Web-scraping function, a MapReduce job, or a PDF extraction, script it and include it in your reproducible process. However, a user transaction object contains a host of data that isnt relevant to the trades that will eventually be created, and is associated with other objects that are also not relevant. On-site interview included a 1 hr AMA lunch session which I really enjoyed. Then Kramer. I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. Anything that didnt get a new, rebranded template stayed in the world of plain old production. For each project type we knew we would need to support: Static code analysis Unit tests Integration tests Build steps Test reports We define the specific jobs a project will run during CI by looking at theprojecttypevalue inside a projectscoach.yml. 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. Test, repeat, test. What would you say has been the most rewarding part of your experience so far? Standardize and educate A major part of our data warehouse build out was in clarifying definitions of business terms and key metrics present in our daily parlance. One thing we liked about Ansible Vault is that it allows you to encrypt a whole file or just a string. Google question - Design an access card system. If there was an issue, how did you handle the situation? I searched every new term I came across and, when that wasnt enough, asked my co-workers for help. Simple. These were some of the questions we asked ourselves during this part of the design phase. In my experience, the best approach was to jump in and rewrite a small piece of code that was not tested, and then add tests for the rewritten portion appropriately. By only using the server as a JSON API, the frontend needed to know exactly what to do with that JSON. Looking for the best java software engineer interview questions to ask candidates during your hiring process? Weve written a few useful helpers that allow us to easily plug in our new server-driven style into our existing Marionette application. We use Marionette.js, a framework built on top of Backbone.js, to help us organize our JavaScript and manage page state. We offer a competitive equity package, health, dental and vision benefits, and a 401 (k) offering with employer match as well as flexible PTO policy. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. Several times we ran into corner cases around old users, test users, and other anomalous data that caused false positive failures in our characterization tests. This Is How You Bootstrap a Data Team Data alone is not enoughwe needed the right storytellers. 4. Our production model is orders of magnitude more complex, and considers each Betterment customers individual tax lots, which introduces hundreds of individual constraints to our model. Dont get swallowed by a faceless engineering org. Everyone was really nice and thoughtful and genuinely wanted to know about me. The next thing we needed to decide was what user experiences we actually wanted to test with our integration tests. First, how would we want to make a test harness for this app? The first round of "in person" interviews. There are repos, each repo has one or more projects of any type. Takeaways Though our venture into the Julia world is still relatively young compared to most of the other code at Betterment, we have found Julia to be a perfect fit in solving our two-language problem within the Investing team. While we love the concern that our engineers show toward solving these problems, these deviations became problematic for applications of the same runtime that should abide by the same set of rules; for example, all Ruby apps should runRSpecandRubocop, not just some of them. Heres how we did it. Once a new registration event is received, the registry server opens a pull request to the Julia registry. In our app we use dio and not dart:io's built-in HTTP client mostly due to preference and slight feature set differences. The resulting analytical master file was still large, but small enough to fit on a regular MacBook Pro. Keep in mind, descriptive group names go a long way in adding clarity to what dependencies that bucket relies upon. I just happen to know that it was a tool available to us, and it happened to model the problem we needed to solve very well. And, boy howdy, are there plenty of available frameworks for doing this kind of thing! Code defines how your application behaves. We use Python more for data pipeline processes and R more for modeling, analyses, and reporting. We think that our Web app will be just as pleasant to use, and we can more quickly enhance and build new features going forward. With our app being add-to-app and utilizing plugins, we didnt want to have to run anything native in our testing. Following their apprenticeship, they joined us as full-time Junior Engineers. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. When a secret is added to production, we have a check that makes sure that same secret is also added to all other ecosystems so that they continue to function properly. This question can help the interviewer understand how you approach a project and what your thought process is. This is where SLOs come in. What all of these tasks had in common (aside from being, well, really important to our business) is that they were executed via a database-backed job-execution framework called Delayed, a newly-open-sourced library that were excited to announce right now, as part of this blog post!
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