Tagged in backend :
Putting the Tech in Fintech: How We Use FIX to Execute Trades at Scale
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
How we standardized MariaDB in our Integration Server
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
The Hidden Cost of Convenience: Rethinking Old ORM Patterns for Scale
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
ValidUntil: Ensuring compile-time data integrity in our investing system
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 ValidUntil that allows engineers to have confidence that… 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
Optimizing Multi-table SQL Queries
Wealthfront’s trading system evaluates hundreds of thousands of client accounts daily for tax-loss harvesting and rebalancing opportunities, requiring high throughput to process all accounts within market hours and low latency to minimize price movement while making investment decisions. In a system with heavy database usage that has low-latency SLA’s such as ours, database queries must… Read more