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 ago, seven of us walked through the doors at Wealthfront. While the teams we’re on, the day-to-day work we’re asked to do, and the technical challenges we dive into are unique to each of us, our collective experiences paint a clear picture: Wealthfront is a place that allows for unparalleled learning and growth.

To capture what it’s really like to start your engineering career here, we each chose one word to define our experience. Here are those words – and the stories behind them:

“Osmosis” – Catie Corley (DIY Investing)

I have always loved school because I loved the feeling that there was always something new to learn. When I was first starting out my career, I worried that I would eventually learn how to do my job, settle into a routine, and reach the plateau that seemed inevitable once there were no more classes to take.

However, my first two years at Wealthfront have not felt like racing toward a plateau; they have felt more like osmosis. To be clear, learning has required a lot more effort than just standing next to smart people and hoping their expertise transfers. This absorption of knowledge happens because learning is woven into nearly everything I do. A confusing production issue becomes a lesson in how several systems interact. A design discussion changes how I think about the tradeoffs behind a seemingly simple decision. Owning a project teaches me not only how to build something, but how to ask better questions, communicate uncertainty, and make decisions that other people can rely on.

There is no syllabus for this kind of learning. It comes from moving between writing code, investigating unexpected behavior, receiving thoughtful feedback, and revising my understanding each time I encounter a problem from a new angle. My teammates have been an important part of that process too as they share context generously, challenge my assumptions, and give me the room to develop conclusions of my own.

Over time, those lessons have changed more than just what I know. They have changed how I operate. I have grown from sometimes looking to others for reassurance into confidently navigating ambiguity and taking ownership from investigation through resolution. I entered the workforce afraid that leaving school might mean leaving continuous growth behind. At Wealthfront, I have found a version of learning that is less structured, more demanding, and ultimately more powerful because I get to apply it to work that matters.

“Trust” – Ethan Choi (Managed Investing)

Last month, we released Wealthfront Custodial Accounts. This is an exciting next step for us in growing with our clients as they look for new ways to invest for their children. We worked on a very condensed timeline and executed the project from planning to its full release in just two months. As the project lead for Custodial Accounts, this project will always be especially meaningful to me because of the level of trust that was demonstrated on every axis of the project.

Wealthfront is an extremely high-trust institution in every direction. Wealthfront trusted me to lead the Custodial Accounts project. I trusted everyone that I worked with to excel in their responsibilities on the project. Wealthfront clients trust Wealthfront with their own investments and also with investments for their children.

At Wealthfront, we trust each other deeply and clients trust us to manage significant parts of their finances. The trust given at Wealthfront from our clients and our colleagues is extremely empowering and makes the work that we do here sincerely meaningful. Years of commitment to the quality of our work and to our clients have built an extremely strong sense of trust at Wealthfront that I am really honored to be a part of.

When I was searching for my first role after college, I was looking for things that other NCGs have written about in this post: impact, growth, and empowerment. Everyone from Wealthfront promised that I would find these here. Starting my career with Wealthfront required a significant level of trust in these promises in order to get the most out of the first years of my career. With absolutely no regrets, I now confidently tell everyone that Wealthfront has exceeded all of my expectations and has certainly earned my trust.

“Impact” – Grace Sun (Trading Infrastructure)

At Wealthfront, you aren’t just handed tickets to complete – you are empowered to drive measurable business impact from day one. There is never a shortage of complex, consequential work to tackle.

During my first year, I led the Fractional Fix Orders (FFO) project, which completely overhauled our fractional trading system. By building new infrastructure that enabled us to directly place orders fractionally (as opposed to rounding every order up the closest whole number), this single initiative saved the company a significant amount of money in reduced spread loss. Just as importantly, FFO was impactful in laying the groundwork for future optimizations. The infrastructure we put in place enabled my team to then build Dollar Denominated Orders (DDO), which is a feature that allows for highly accurate, notional-specified buys that invest all available cash regardless of market movement.

I continued to drive impact in the trading area by leading an integration with a new executing broker for both whole-share and fractional trades, and I recently redesigned the load-testing infrastructure to ensure our trading system can withstand high-volume market days under various account configurations. Beyond the codebase, I’ve also been able to share technical deep dives with the broader engineering community on our blog (Trading Over FIX and H2 Framework). If you want to build systems that matter, you can genuinely expect to leave your mark here.

“Elite” – Joshua Mei (Cash Platform)

Okay bear with me, I promise I’m going somewhere with this. Out of all the phenomena that happen in the NBA, my favorite is one that only happens once every four years – when we recruit and send the 12 best American players we have to the Olympics. Over the course of those next few months, these players train together, share meals and give interviews together, sing Vanessa Carlton on planes together, play basketball together, and at the end of it all, hopefully bite down on Olympic gold together. And here’s my favorite part: the next season, the young guys on that team take a leap. After spending all that time basking in what it means to be exceptional, spending early mornings in the gym with Lebron, learning schemes from Erik Spoelstra and playing what’s generally a more fluid, egalitarian, beautiful brand of basketball than the one they’re used to, they come back with some new moves, some added tricks, and a better understanding of the habits it takes to win. 

Anyway, that’s how I feel working at Wealthfront. We’re a small, tight-knit engineering team (with honestly some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet), but also one with the talent to challenge and out-compete legacy financial titans. That only happens by finding exceptional people, investing in them, and giving them room to do their best work. It’s self sustaining, as Catie highlighted; starting your career here encourages a journey of growth that’s authentic and sustainable in a way you only get by surrounding yourself with the people, work, and a mission that you respect. It’s also an environment where you’re given the grace to fail and keep iterating as a way of continuous improvement¹. Choosing Wealthfront means maintaining a level of execution yourself ², for the sake of your teammates and our clients, starting with the coding bootcamp you’ll take when you first start and extending to the way you get to roll up your sleeves every day to lead projects and push code. And finally, perhaps especially, starting your career at Wealthfront is a personal invitation to join an elite team, with some of the best minds in the business: to live in a shared codebase, drive projects, and ultimately, to become an engineer who depends on them, and who they can depend on as well. 

“Value” – Saagar Mahadev (Home Lending)

If I had to describe my time at Wealthfront in one word, it would be value. It’s been a two-way street: I’ve had the opportunity to create value while constantly deriving value from the people, experiences, and challenges around me.

Over the past two years, I’ve been trusted to lead key projects in our greenfield Home Lending initiative, helping build out our mortgage origination systems from the ground up. This included delivering critical features like joint-access support for multi-borrower applications, a real-time data synchronization system between our client applications  and Loan Origination System, and a document signing and disclosure integration for time-sensitive, late stage loan processes. Beyond product development, I’ve aimed to add value by mentoring engineers, reviewing pull requests for new hires as part of our onboarding course, and contributing to engineering infrastructure through our recent efforts to migrate our builds systems from Maven to Gradle.

Just as meaningful, however, has been the value I’ve gained. Working alongside exceptionally sharp, thoughtful teammates across engineering, product, design, compliance, and loan operations has raised my own bar every day. Collaborating with such talented minds directly sharpened my technical abilities, honed my problem-solving skills, and deepened my domain expertise in mortgage fintech – knowledge that will undoubtedly pay off when I purchase a home of my own one day. Every challenge and every teammate has added immense value to my growth as an engineer, mentor, and teammate.

Looking back, the value I’ve been able to create was only possible because of the trust, support, and environment Wealthfront provided from day one.

“Empowerment” – Thomas Fenaroli (Trading Products)

At Wealthfront, New College Grads (colloquially referred to as NCGs) are empowered to take charge of their careers. I remember being extremely excited – and nervous – with how much responsibility I was given in my first months on the Trading Products team. During my first few years at Wealthfront, I’ve had the opportunity to lead a breadth of projects, from platform-level tooling to projects that directly improved our clients’ investing experience. I’ve also had the freedom to pursue projects that have particularly interested me and allowed me to become an expert in our pricing systems.

Another way that NCGs are empowered is through the on-call onboarding process. As an on-call engineer, you have significant responsibility on your shoulders; it is up to you to ensure that our products are working as expected and that our clients are being served properly. Ensuring deposits are invested on time, keeping our real-time price systems up and running, and ensuring our managed accounts are evaluated for tax-loss harvesting each day are just a few examples of the important work done behind the scenes by our on-call engineers.

Wealthfront invests a lot into the NCG program, and being part of it has allowed me to grow significantly as an engineer and as a person. I would highly recommend the program to anyone looking for their first engineering role out of college!

“Growth” – William Pan (Settlement)

Looking back, I think my past self would be amazed at my growth as an engineer after just two years at Wealthfront. During my time here, I’ve led multiple client-impacting projects from design to deployment, developed a strong understanding of  how money movement between financial institutions happens day-to-day, worked closely with multiple senior engineers and various third-party institutions, and even had the opportunity to mentor newly joining engineers. 

As a new college graduate, there’s no other company like Wealthfront which will offer you the same opportunities to quickly develop your skills as an engineer. We constantly encourage engineers to take on new challenges and expand their responsibilities and role within the company. If you want a head start into your software engineering career, Wealthfront is definitely the company to join.

Closing Thoughts

While no two new graduate experiences at Wealthfront are exactly the same, the common threads are undeniable. Whether it’s the osmosis of learning from brilliant peers, the deep trust placed in us to lead complex projects, or the proximity to elite talent, this environment is uniquely designed to accelerate your career.

We have been given the autonomy to drive real impact, the chance to both add and gain immense value, and the empowerment to take ownership of our own trajectories. The result of all these elements combined is exponential growth.

Choosing your first job after college goes far beyond just the tech stack. By joining Wealthfront, you choose a culture that actively invests in you and gives you the opportunity to step right into the center of the innovation that’s happening here. If you’re ready to take on big challenges, learn faster than you thought possible, and discover what your defining word will be, we’d love for you to join us.

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Disclosures

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