Betterment recruiter reached out to me about a Trading team opening. 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. Betterment was super supportive and accommodating. One tech phone screen, 5 hrs on site with other team leads, hiring manager, CTO, and a follow-up 2hrs onsite tech interview, offer was made. All it took was 1 week. IMHO, Betterment hiring process is best in the business. All technical questions was real world scenarios that a production systems face, they drilled me pretty good on algo, database design, usage, architecture designs, real world questions, not some random questions from EPI. It also gave me a good view on what's day to day work is like. On-site interview included a 1 hr AMA lunch session which I really enjoyed. They were honest and straight shooter, got a good sense of the mainly good and bad working at Betterment. Everyone from Betterment is proud of the company and work they have done there, which made my decision not join really difficult. After this process, I am a fan of Betterment.

I applied online. A recruiter followed up within two days and we did a call to discuss qualifications. He did a good job explaining the different roles available and listening to my needs without being too pushy. The next step was a technical screen over the phone using codepad. It began with some verbal Q&A about how things like databases and the internet work, along with certain tradeoffs. We then moved into a coding problem that involved writing classes to model data and logic to query that data to answer increasingly complex questions. 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. The engineer also left time to take questions and he came off as honest about the pros and cons of his experience. The on-site interview consisted of three parts: 2 technical interviews, lunch with a "buddy", and then several non-technical interviews with product and engineering leadership. I was also invited back the following week to speak with another product person and the CTO. The technical interviews stood out from other on-site experiences because the problems felt "real world" - they were based on actual challenges Betterment's team has had to solve. One problem was purely coding while the other involved system design on the whiteboard. In each case, once I had a clear solution in mind, we shifted to a laptop set up with IntelliJ to implement and test parts of my solution. 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. But I really liked how "organic" these problems were since I got a sense of the actual challenges I would be facing as well as the tools and practices used by the team. The product and engineering leadership I spoke to all came off as humble and knowledgeable, and were open about existing pain points and challenges. There was no hint of arrogance or a lack of candor from anyone. 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. Out of 7 offers my decision came down to between Betterment and another company. Ultimately I decided to go with the other company because the team I'll be joining is newly forming and there's an outsized opportunity to have a big impact. 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. Also, I didn't think I would ever say this, but the recruiter I worked with throughout the process was truly amazing. He had great communication, was organized and empathetic, remembered things I said weeks earlier, etc. And when my decision making got bogged down at the end he didn't try to hassle me with silly deadlines.