Running in the Background: Building Seamless Account Linking
Long ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and Wealthfront was starting to brainstorm a financial planning offering, early designs amounted to an online financial calculator with lots of bells and whistles. Users would be expected to enter all of their account information by hand — and keep it up to date! It took minimal… Read more
My Ten-Character Win
Last year, Wealthfront changed the way we do business in a huge way. In order to better serve our clients by taking on more brokerage responsibilities ourselves, we transitioned from being a fully-disclosed brokerage to an omnibus brokerage. In addition to paving the way for new functionality such as our Portfolio Line of Credit, our… Read more
Our Adventures in Scaling
Unpredictable Scaling Wealthfront’s position as a financial services company presents interesting scalability challenges. The announcement of a stock market decline for instance can cause a large number of our clients to simultaneously pick up their phones, load their Wealthfront accounts, and look to see how the market activity has impacted their finances. After one particularly… Read more
Testing Golang Services at Wealthfront
As Wealthfront grows our company and products, scaling our engineering organization requires robust, well tested infrastructure and tooling provided by the DevOps team. In this blog post, I’ll go over how DevOps is defined at Wealthfront, why we use Go, and a brief overview of how we test Go. What is DevOps at Wealthfront? At… Read more
Testing the GPS behind tomorrow’s self-driving money™️
Recently, Wealthfront CEO Andy Rachleff shared the following vision at the CB Insights Future of Fintech conference: “Our vision is to deliver a service where you direct deposit your paycheck with us. We automatically pay your bills. We automatically top off your emergency fund, and then route money to whatever account is the most ideal… Read more
Continuous Deployment with Spark Streaming (Part II)
In Part 1 of this series, we gave a brief look into the data platform at Wealthfront, focusing on how we minimize data processing downtime while redeploying our Spark Streaming jobs. In this final part of this series, we will describe how we coordinate the data in our serving layer and wrap the blog post… Read more