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 dive in and the specific moments that they realized just how much our values are active parts of our daily work.
Melissa Kaufman-Gomez is an Engineering Manager on the DevOps team. Before Wealthfront, she spent several years working as a backend engineer at a seed-stage startup that was acquired by CLEAR. She lives in Brooklyn and enjoys cooking, checking restaurants off of her Google Maps Saved Places, and taking long walks with her dog, Dobby.
Sanjana Kaundinya is an Engineering Manager on the Brokerage Infrastructure team. Before Wealthfront, she spent several years as a software engineer at Confluent working on Apache Kafka. She lives in San Francisco and enjoys dancing and checking out new restaurants and bars in the area.
What made you decide to join Wealthfront?
Melissa: I started using Wealthfront after graduating from college. I remember feeling completely overwhelmed by personal finance, and some of my coworkers at the time recommended Wealthfront. On a mission to educate myself on investing, I read A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel, who I later learned is Wealthfront’s Chief Investment Officer. Fast forward to a few months ago, I interviewed at Wealthfront and saw firsthand how the company operates around the goal of making investing more accessible. Joining this team feels very full circle in that I have the opportunity to work on a product that strongly shaped my own approach to investing.
Additionally, I found that the interview process was a two-way street, with dedicated time for me to understand the company. Many of the conversations highlighted Wealthfront’s approach to building software, and there was actually a moment where I realized, “This is exactly what I’m looking for in my next role.” A key insight came from a discussion with Julien Wetterwald, Wealthfront’s CTO, regarding the concept of individual ownership. He explained that a single owner designs and presents every design document. Crucially, there is no required “approver” to sign off on the design. While the owner receives feedback, they are ultimately responsible for incorporating that feedback and determining the project’s direction. In my career, I’ve seen design document approval by multiple stakeholders stall projects or make debates unproductive due to the approval dynamic. This conversation showed me how empowering the owner to make the best design decision for the company aligns the owner and those providing feedback toward the same objective. Having these ideas “click” during the interviews was pretty exciting, and I knew Wealthfront was a place where I’d be able to learn and grow as a leader.
Sanjana: As a loyal user for three years, I had already experienced how Wealthfront’s product transforms financial fear into confidence. Coming from an infrastructure background working on Apache Kafka, I was eager to apply distributed systems concepts to a new, high-stakes domain. And I found exactly that challenge within Wealthfront’s brokerage platform. I was captivated by the sheer scale of the financial infrastructure here and was thrilled to discover a team that shares my passion for deep technical rigor: specifically the commitment to using automation to solve complex operational problems rather than relying on manual processes. Equally compelling to me is how deeply we live our values. During the interview process, I was told that decisions were driven by facts, and I’ve been impressed by how true that actually is. Whether it’s in meetings or performance reviews, we constantly reference our operating principles to ensure we aren’t just operating based on feelings, but executing based on data and what is in the best interest of our clients. A perfect example of this was our recent decision to increase the APY on our Cash Account. When the data showed we had the opportunity to pass more interest along to our clients, we immediately made the decision to do so. It’s been incredibly motivating to see that these values aren’t just abstract concepts, but the active framework we rely on to solve problems every day.
What is a value or operating principle at Wealthfront that really resonates with you?
Melissa: I’ve found the engineering organization’s ethos to be a strong fit, particularly the existing frameworks designed to manage classic challenges like balancing quality and roadmap execution. A great example is the concept of “proportional investment,” which empowers engineers to interrupt their current work to address irritating issues or toil. If an engineer notices a noisy alert that takes an hour to debug, they can devote an hour towards fixing the alert. I’m very familiar with the struggle to prioritize toil reduction, especially when those tasks compete for sprint space with roadmapped initiatives. At Wealthfront, one of the ways that we uphold quality is through proportional investment, which provides a framework for engineers to make time to improve things on their own without needing to convince several other stakeholders.
Sanjana: One operating principle that truly resonates with me is ‘disagree and commit.’ I appreciate this value because it fosters an environment where dissent isn’t just tolerated, it is actively encouraged. We are pushed to engage in healthy, fact-based debates to ensure we aren’t just accepting the status quo, but actually arriving at the best technical solution. This freedom to challenge ideas allows us to pressure-test our assumptions without fear, ensuring that every voice is heard before a decision is finalized. We saw this recently during the design phase for a project we are currently working on regarding transaction entry. Within the engineering team, there was a healthy debate on the right performance targets: should we architect for maximum theoretical throughput immediately, or target a threshold that comfortably exceeded our current needs while avoiding premature complexity? We analyzed the data and trade-offs, and ultimately converged on a target that provided a robust, high-quality solution for what we are building today. Once that decision was made, the debate ended, and the whole team fully committed to the plan. It was a perfect example of balancing intellectual honesty with the discipline to focus on the right technical solution.
What was your experience onboarding to Wealthfront?
Melissa: I’ve worked on backend teams for most of my career, so I’ve had a lot to learn joining the DevOps area. This was actually something I was a bit worried about coming in – how was I going to manage a team responsible for the lowest level of our stack and our datacenters, networking, and hardware? My manager helped me see that even without direct experience in DevOps, the things I cared about and questions I asked as a backend Engineering Manager were actually quite relevant to DevOps. Plus, he assured me that the team was knowledgeable and would be there to help me onboard (this has been very true!). Since I didn’t have experience with DevOps prior to joining Wealthfront, I onboarded as an engineer for the first few months, taking on small tickets initially, then eventually writing a design doc and shadowing on-call. I’m grateful that I was given the time to go through technical onboarding courses and ship code; it’s really important that I have an understanding of the project space, on-call, and team load as I start to take on more management responsibilities. Most importantly, although I won’t deny it’s scary at first to feel like you don’t know what’s going on, I’m really glad I took a small leap of faith to join a new area. I have the privilege of learning something new every day, and I’ve been able to ramp up and contribute quickly with the help of my team.
Sanjana: One unique aspect of Wealthfront is that Engineering Managers onboard as software engineers. My first few weeks weren’t spent in management meetings, but in our ‘Modern Java’ crash course: a deep-dive requirement for every new backend engineer to master our coding fundamentals and best practices within a sandbox environment. Once I graduated from the sandbox, I started picking up tickets and shipping code. My first task involved writing logic to handle ‘marketless securities’, assets that don’t trade on public exchanges. I had to ensure our system automatically retained fractional shares for these assets since they can’t be sold for cash. Jumping straight into this kind of domain complexity was the perfect way to understand the problems my team solves daily. It was also incredibly empowering to see that, even as a new manager still in onboarding, I was able to ship a solution that directly improved our data integrity. In addition, seeing how the team applies engineering principles to automate these intricate financial rules was the perfect bridge for me. It showed me that while the domain is finance, the solution is always pure engineering.
As someone joining the engineering organization, what has stood out about Wealthfront as a company?
Melissa: One of the things that has stood out to me is the positivity, competence, and enthusiasm people bring to work every day. This is especially palpable in our weekly All Hands meeting, where there’s a steady stream of support for demos and excitement in the live chat. This energy is also obvious in interactions with my coworkers. When I shadowed on-call, the primary on-call engineer communicated their step-by-step thought process diagnosing alerts, which was really useful as I familiarized myself with the stack. It’s motivating to come to work and be surrounded by people who are excited to solve hard problems and build the best product for our clients. There’s also a deep sense of curiosity in everything from informal chats to design docs to post mortems. When creating a design document, we encourage the author to explore and present multiple implementations, discussing the pros and cons across various decision axes. This is different from the approach I’ve seen elsewhere, where typically only a single solution is proposed. I think the way that design docs are presented at Wealthfront leads to openness and healthy discourse that helps engineers identify the best solution.
Sanjana: What stands out most to me is how distinctively engineering led Wealthfront is. This engineering-first mindset also dictates how we sustain that technology. We adhere to a principle called ‘Proportional Investment,’ which empowers teams to allocate time to fixing toil in direct proportion to the pain it causes. If we spend an hour manually fixing an issue, we are encouraged to invest at least an hour automating that toil away, whether by writing software to solve it permanently or building better tools. This approach ensures we aren’t just patching problems, but actively automating our operations to keep our focus on high-leverage engineering. A concrete example of this was in one of my first tickets. We discovered that if a security wasn’t set up for fractional trading, but our system tried to give a user a fraction of a share during a corporate action, it created an error that our Trading Team had to fix manually. Instead of letting them suffer through that manual process forever, we prioritized the engineering work to add a validation layer that prevents this scenario entirely. That is Proportional Investment in action: spending engineering effort today to eliminate operational toil tomorrow.
What’s a complex technical problem your team is tackling?
Melissa: We’re currently in the middle of a multi-quarter project to support database sharding and multitenancy. The project is a collaboration between DevOps and backend platform teams to ensure we’re designing the hardware and software in lockstep. Since we manage our own datacenters, my team has been doing a lot of prep work to gather capacity projections and order and rack new hardware.
Sanjana: My team manages the mission-critical post-trade infrastructure that automates the complete lifecycle of securities clearance, settlement, and custody for the brokerage side of our business. We are responsible for ensuring the correctness, durability, and tracking of every transaction. This presents a significant technical challenge: we must navigate complex regulatory requirements all while optimizing performance for the hardware running in our self-managed data centers.
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Disclosures:
The Cash Account is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC (“Wealthfront Brokerage”), Member ofFINRA/SIPC. Neither Wealthfront Brokerage nor any of its affiliates are a bank, and the Cash Account itself is not a deposit account. The Annual Percentage Yield (“APY”) on cash deposits as of January 30, 2026 is representative, requires no minimums, and may change at any time. The APY for the Wealthfront Cash Account represents the weighted average of the APY on the aggregate deposit balances of all clients at insured depository institutions that participate in our cash sweep program (the “Program Banks”). Wealthfront sweeps available cash balances to Program Banks where they earn the variable APY. Financial planning tools are provided by Wealthfront Software LLC (“Wealthfront Software”).
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