Backend Software Engineer

Betterment is a smart automated investing service that provides optimized investment returns for individual, IRA, ROTH IRA, and rollover 401(k) accounts. Its technology enables users to manage their investments in a customized, diversified portfolio. Charging a management fee of 0.25%, the company’s mobile app enables users to access, view, share, and review their portfolio’s activities as well as deposit and withdraw money from anywhere, anytime.

Backend Systems is the engineering team responsible for the Trading and Automation software at the heart of the Betterment platform. On a busy day, we trade millions of dollars and execute a similar scale of transactions in the market. Every ounce of efficiency and intelligence we put into this system translates into more value for our customers.

We’re looking for engineers to help us answer some of our most difficult product, scaling, and optimization questions. **Questions like** * How can we increase the efficiency of our systems by 10x while scaling our daily transactions by 10x over the same period? * How can we use the history of our customer transactions to predict and prevent future fraud attempts? * What code patterns and testing approaches do we need to guarantee that we never, ever fail in an unexpected or undefined way? * How do we evolve the architecture and the orchestration and inspection of all of our running processes to increase transparency? * How do we go all-in on cloud infrastructure while increasing data security and privacy for our customers? **At Betterment, you’re going to…** * Build things people love. Our goal is to delight our customers whenever possible. Sleek design, simple user experience, and access to smart decisions help us to achieve it. * Solve “impossible” problems. Take your ideas to the next level right away. We experiment, iterate, learn, and repeat. * Collaborate, with purpose. You’ll work in small groups with other talented thinkers and figure out how to make Betterment’s revolutionary software even better. * Gain trust through transparency. We believe in taking the guesswork out of investing. That means a consistent experience for our customers — you’ll build the tools to make it possible. * Create efficiency. Our software helps customers save time and money. We maintain it through clean code, pragmatic programming, and lean engineering. * Work with people who care. Half of our team is made up of engineers but we believe everyone at Betterment is an engineer with their own tools. We’re a group of talented professionals who pride ourselves on what we do. We’re smart, innovative, energetic, and lots of fun.

**You'll be effective if you** * Have deep expertise in at least one object oriented language, such as Java, C#, C++, Ruby, or Python. You know the list. * Have a strong command of fundamental algorithms and data structures * Have a passion for software engineering, and for creating what doesn’t exist * Know how to make the tradeoffs required to ship without compromising quality * Know that investing in developing solid tests pays for itself several times over * Appreciate agility and pragmatism in software development * Thrive in a startup environment **Tools in your belt** Java, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL, Amazon Web Services, Linux Backend Engineering spends most of its time with the tools above, but we cast a much wider net in other parts of the engineering team. We strive to always choose the best tool for the job. When building systems that connect to financial markets and institutions, the core toolset is probably Java-based. That said, we use plenty of Python and Ruby within the core as well, and you’ll be working alongside teams that live-and-breathe Javascript, R, Ruby, Rails, Backbone and Spring MVC.