Work(ing) at Wealthfront: Kevin Yeh
Kevin is currently a Data Engineer but initially joined Wealthfront as a Front End Engineer back when there were less than 40 employees in the company. He has been part of a variety of projects related to feature development, growth, and infrastructure. Most recently, he worked on an event ingestion pipeline to analyze user activity and helped deliver analytics related to Wealthfront’s new retirement planning feature, Path.
How did you first hear about Wealthfront?
In 2014, I had attended a programming accelerator called Dev Bootcamp. Upon graduating, Dev Bootcamp connected me with Wealthfront. I had done some research about the company, and was drawn in by the opportunity to be a part of a fast-growing startup with an experienced executive team.
You started your career at Wealthfront as a Front End Engineer, and you are currently with the Data Engineering team. Can you tell us more about that transition?
I was hired as a Front End Engineer, and worked on projects focused on our desktop browser app for about a year. It was then when my manager asked if I’d like to try working on a couple of projects that would help ETL data from third party vendors into our data platform. I hadn’t pushed any Java code into production before, but the rest of my skills were a good fit because I could understand the structure of web-based API calls. I took on the project, as I was excited to try out a new skill and learn more about data processing. With the mentorship of the engineers on the Data team, I was able to successfully deliver on the project.
After this, there were a sequence of projects that we wanted done in our data platform, and I was asked if I’d be interested in working on them. I took on the challenge and over time, I built up my skills and knowledge in the data platform code base. I enjoyed the work that I did and the team I was on, and after several months I made a more official transition to Data Engineering.
What is the most valuable thing you have learned at Wealthfront so far?
Having been at different companies before this, I will say that our engineering culture and core values go a long way towards improving the quality of life as an engineer. Notably, maintaining a list of proportional investment projects allows us to appropriately balance projects that help automate and improve developer productivity with client-facing features. Another value we have is maintaining monitoring around production systems, which not only allow us to improve visibility for on-call rotations, but also help us appropriately assess the urgency for scaling existing systems.
What is your favorite tradition here?
In the three years of working here, the company has participated in the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge, which is a charity race where we get to race as a company in downtown San Francisco. I’ve gotten more involved in running since then.
What do you want the world to know about you?
I drive a Honda Element, and I think it’s the best car ever.
Interested in working with Kevin? Check out our open roles!
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