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 ad...

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 Wealthfron...

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,” ...

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....

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 ...

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 th...

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 li...

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 ...

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 q...

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 syst...

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 ...

As a financial services company, it is paramount that our investing system makes decisions based on accurate, up-to-date, and valid data. A single bad input can lead to disastrous outcomes, including costly trading mistakes and a loss of client trust. At Wealthfront, we built a system called ValidUn...

The DevOps team at Wealthfront has been in the process of migrating services to run inside containers. As part of this process we need a way to build containers using our CI/CD tool, Jenkins. While we could write a Jenkinsfile for each container image we wanted to build, we identified this was a goo...

One of our core engineering principles at Wealthfront is maintaining a high standard of quality and platform infrastructure, and that includes keeping our platforms up to date on the latest releases. On Android, this means keeping our targetSdk up to date, which provides Wealthfront’s Android users ...

My first time walking into Wealthfront’s office wasn’t the first day of my internship. Instead, it was 4 months prior, when I was flown out to Palo Alto for the onsite interview. Wealthfront was the only company that flew me out for an in-person interview. And it was awesome. Not just because the pe...

End to end (E2E) tests play a crucial role in ensuring software quality and when implemented effectively, can eliminate the need for manual testing (see our engineering principles). However E2E tests are notoriously slow since they often involve navigating through multiple screens, making API calls,...

Like many companies that use the cloud, Wealthfront uses AWS Lambda. And while our lambdas look pristine in the web console and perform their highly specific duties well, there’s quite a bit that happens before our lambdas get to that state–I’m referring to CI/CD. However, depending on the given lam...