11 posts · 1 company · newest first
At Wealthfront, a core pillar of our business model is addressing our clients’ needs proactively, efficiently, and with minimal unnecessary toil. As our client base grows, and as we ship an ever broader suite of products and features, the breadth of issues our support and operations staff have to address grows as well. Our preference... Read more
Amazon Redshift is a core part of our analytics platform, powering dashboards, data quality checks, ad-hoc analytical workloads, and downstream reporting on a shared cluster. Because everything runs on the same cluster, the size and health of our tables directly affects every workload. At Wealthfront, data drives every decision we make, which means any performance... Read more
Part of a series on Wealthfront’s AI Developer Tooling Why Code Review? At Wealthfront, our arc of AI adoption has followed a familiar pattern: from skepticism to experimentation to deep adoption in the code lifecycle. Just a few years ago, in the dark era of “AI coding is just fancy autocomplete,” we heard rumors of... Read more
There’s a common saying that life is a series of opening and closing doors. When you graduate college, you’re handed a master key that unlocks countless doors in your path. This is a pivotal time – that first door you choose to walk through sets the foundation for the rest of your career. Two years... Read more
Introduction Our Android team uses Gradle as our build tool of choice. Gradle offers lots of options for tuning its resource consumption, giving engineers an opportunity to optimize performance for running tasks on well-known hardware. In this post, we’ll explore how the team tuned our Gradle setup for Amazon’s m7i.8xlarge EC2 instances. General concepts Before... Read more
At Wealthfront, the “tech” in financial technology isn’t just a buzzword—it’s the foundation of everything we build. Beneath the intuitive frontend our clients interact with lies a complex ecosystem of distributed systems. One of the most critical pieces of that backend architecture is the engine that enables us to route massive volumes of trades efficiently. ... Read more
Engineering at Wealthfront is centered on the idea that code should be written to facilitate testing, not the other way around. Without a staging environment to fall back on, we maximize confidence through a sophisticated, multi-layered testing strategy. While unit tests provide our most rigorous line of defense, our Integration Server is the workhorse that... Read more
Every iOS application starts as a monolith. Xcode’s default project structure places all source files, resources, and build configuration into a single module (or target, for all the iOS devs reading this). For small apps, this works fine. For a 10+ year old financial application with roughly 2,000 Swift and a handful of Objective-C files,... Read more
At Wealthfront, our engineering culture is something you experience as soon as you join the organization, and new hires are regularly surprised by how quickly and fully they begin to contribute and drive impact. We sat down with two of our new engineering managers, Melissa and Sanjana, to hear how quickly they were able to... Read more
Ever been here before? Stuck with a job that needs to be continually revisited because its performance gets worse with every passing day, and each attempt at improving said performance yields diminishing returns? This is the situation we found ourselves in with the portfolio balance calculation system—the code responsible for aggregating data from multiple sources... Read more
We take code correctness and code quality seriously at Wealthfront. One of the most effective ways we ensure that our code is correct is through rigorous unit testing and strong typing. In Kotlin, sealed classes and sealed interfaces offer a powerful tool to model restricted class hierarchies. They provide strong guarantees about the types in... Read more