Senior Staff Engineer, Betterment
$230-270k
+ Equity
More information about location
4 days a week in office
Automated investing & financial planning
Be an early applicant
Automated investing & financial planning
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$230-270k
+ Equity
More information about location
4 days a week in office
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease.
Role
Who you are
- A strong technical lead capable of establishing the strategic vision for Betterment’s AI systems while also working hands-on alongside senior and staff IC colleagues to build it into reality
- Deep expertise in LLM systems, including prompt engineering, agentic workflows, and evaluation systems
- Experience operating AI features in production, ensuring quality and auditability via online and offline validation, automated monitoring, and human-in--the-loop oversight
- Comfort operating at the frontier. The ability and drive to stay current with emerging tools, techniques, and best practices within the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem
- Clear judgment about when to use AI and when not to, maintaining a grounded, pragmatic perspective on what we should ship to production today
- Proven track record leading successful projects that affect and development workflows used by multiple teams
- Fullstack development experience including React, GraphQL, and one or more server-side languages (Ruby, Java, TypeScript, C#, Python, etc.)
- Experience making sound build vs buy decisions
- Ability to build trust and processes that transcend discipline and team boundaries
- Principled approach to balancing the need to move quickly today with the need to move quickly tomorrow, with an appreciation of how to meet high standards for customer quality and regulatory requirements
What the job involves
- The AI Platform team enables product teams across Betterment to build useful AI-powered features quickly, enjoyably, and responsibly
- As Sr Staff Engineer, you will work with a team of senior/staff engineers delivering an expanding set of AI capabilities as well as shared infrastructure, LLM evaluation frameworks, and internal libraries
- You will help shape and lead the technical direction of our AI product development strategy, working closely with engineering leadership
- You will collaborate with product and compliance partners to ensure Betterment's AI capabilities are developed with the rigor that our customers and regulators expect
- By joining us in the early days of our AI product efforts, you will have significant influence over how the organization delivers exciting features into the Betterment product across all lines of business
- Work with a team of senior/staff engineers building the foundation that enables all Betterment teams to deploy AI features
- Define and drive Betterment's AI platform strategy – the shared infrastructure, evaluation frameworks, internal libraries, and guardrails that allow product teams to build AI features with confidence and speed
- Lead high-leverage projects that expand our organization’s AI technical capabilities, where AI organically enhances existing product value
- Partner with product teams to ship customer-facing AI functionality to production. Develop broad Betterment domain expertise in the process
- Partner with legal and compliance leaders to scale processes that enable teams to build AI functionality quickly and responsibly within a regulated financial services environment
- Mentor and grow senior engineers, sharing your experience to expand their impact and accelerate their growth
Application process
- We’ll take a few weeks to review all applications. If we’d like to spend more time with you, we’ll reach out to arrange next steps, which will include 3-4 sets of meetings with your future colleagues
- In the interview process, we’ll look to learn more about your skills, experiences, capabilities, and motivators. Many of our questions will be aimed at understanding how you might operate here at Betterment
- Depending on the role, we may ask you to complete a case study exercise or technical assessments, as we want to collect a robust set of data points to better inform our decisions
- On average, it takes us around 3-5 weeks to make a hiring decision, depending on your availability and sense of urgency
- As a best practice, we aim to interview at least 2-3 final round candidates before making a hiring decision
- Please note that, as we usually receive an overwhelming number of applications for open positions, we’re unable to offer individual feedback during the interview process
- We recognize that interviewing for a new role is a big deal. We appreciate you considering Betterment as the next step in your career, and our Recruiting Team is here to support and advocate for you through the interview process!
Our take
Betterment is an app-based investment platform that provides personal finance data and guidance to retail users through a range of real-world data and AI analytics to deliver investment advice to customers.
The company has become the largest independent digital investment advisor in the U.S. Having expanded its 401k business, Betterment has entered the world of Crypto, partnering with Gemini to offer customized crypto portfolios and its "Crypto Investing by Betterment" platform.
Betterment has a wealth of competition in this increasingly crowded space. Other robo advisors offering similar services include Moneyfarm, Wealth Simple, M1 Finance and Personal Capital. Going forward, Betterment hopes to further distance itself from rivals as it further innovates its platform.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-6% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Sep 2021
$60m
SERIES F
Jul 2017
$70m
SERIES E
Total funding: $335m
Company benefits
- Compensation & Ownership: Competitive, benchmarked salary. Equity for everyone, including new hire, performance, and refresher grants.
- Retirement: 401(k) match from day one, including Student loan matching. Zero management fees.
- Health & Wellbeing: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage. One Medical membership. Fertility and LGBTQIA+ transition support.
- Time Away: Flexible time off. Paid parental leave for all parents. Four-week sabbatical in year six.
- In-Office Culture & Flexibility: An in-person, collaborative culture, with no required office days during the summer and winter holidays.
- Growth & Development: Free Coaching for everyone and continuous development.
- Community & Care: Chef lunches, guest speakers, company gatherings, heritage celebrations, and seven Employee Resource Groups.
- Employee Support: Dedicated benefits advocate and EAP access.
Company HQ
Chelsea, New York, NY
Leadership
Sarah Kirshbaum Levy
(CEO)Prior to joining Betterment in 2020, Sarah served as the COO for Viacom Media Networks.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 14 more jobs at Betterment