In a Snap! Turbo-charging Our Database Backups
Backing up data is a lot like insurance—we set it up, forget about it, and then panic when we need it most. A weak backup and restore strategy can turn a stressful situation into a disaster. In recent years, we started noticing some weak points in our own backup strategy and knew it was time… Read more
H2 Framework: How We Test Our Automated Investing Infrastructure
At Wealthfront, we build automated investing systems that manage client portfolios with meticulous care by incorporating a large set of rules, optimizations, and input data. Testing such complex systems is inherently challenging; small code changes can interact in unexpected ways, which makes it crucial to have a robust framework that validates our investing decisions. To… Read more
Our Journey to Building a Scalable SQL Testing Library for Athena
Our analytics team plays a vital role in maintaining high-quality data that drives everything from key reports to experiments aimed at improving our products. Ensuring data reliability is critical, and to achieve this, we’ve built a robust SQL testing library for Athena. A strong data foundation isn’t just about accuracy—it’s about reliability. That’s why testing… Read more
How 40 Lines of Code Sped Up iOS End to End Tests by over 50%
At Wealthfront, testing is one of our core engineering principles—in the form of unit and end-to-end testing on all platforms. The iOS team in particular manages its own CI infrastructure to run tests against an integration server mirroring our production environment. With roughly 30k unit tests and nearly 1k iOS end-to-end tests (and counting), speeding… Read more
From Overnight to Over Lunch: Moving Terabytes of Data At 10 Gigabits per Second
How do you quickly move over 160TB of data between AWS and physical data centers? Is it a good idea to store database backups in the cloud? Today we’re going to explore how the Wealthfront DevOps team was able to reduce a multi-day database restore process to a handful of hours using open source tooling…. Read more
How we updated our Performance Review process to help engineers grow
Performance reviews are often a nebulous topic. All companies do them and they can be incredibly important to growth and success, both personally and professionally. Yet they are often a bit of a black box. At Wealthfront, we believe that one of the core goals of the performance review process is to help engineers grow… Read more