Tuning Android build nodes for maximum throughput
Introduction Our Android team uses Gradle as our build tool of choice. Gradle offers lots of options for tuning its resource consumption, giving engineers an opportunity to optimize performance for running tasks on well-known hardware. In this post, we’ll explore how the team tuned our Gradle setup for Amazon’s m7i.8xlarge EC2 instances. General concepts Before… Read more
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
XcodeGen and the quest to modularize the Wealthfront iOS app
Every iOS application starts as a monolith. Xcode’s default project structure places all source files, resources, and build configuration into a single module (or target, for all the iOS devs reading this). For small apps, this works fine. For a 10+ year old financial application with roughly 2,000 Swift and a handful of Objective-C files,… Read more
New Leaders, New Perspectives: Why We Joined Wealthfront Engineering
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… 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