Work(ing) at Wealthfront: Lucie Ackley

Lucie Ackley is currently an intern at Wealthfront working on the data engineering team. She was born and raised in the Bay Area, coincidentally just a few miles from Wealthfront’s office. When it came time to pick a college, Lucie decided to venture away to the East Coast to Brown University where she is studying Computer Science and Applied Math. Lucie loves to surf, snowboard, and do anything outside that is potentially dangerous.
How did you first hear about Wealthfront?
I found Wealthfront through brute force searching of job listings. Ironically, two summers ago I actually took CS109 at Stanford which was taught by one of Wealthfront’s engineers, the great Kevin Shin. I didn’t know that he worked here until after I started!
What project are you working on this summer?
I am working on generating user specific account linking recommendations. When users go to link their account on our website we used to show them the most popular institutions. Using information about a user’s demographics (i.e. age, location, etc.) and financial information, I created a machine learning model to determine which institutions a user is most likely to have.
What advice would you give to interns who want to work at Wealthfront?
Wealthfront is a great place to intern if you are self-motivated and desire to learn a lot. Intern projects are both meaningful and challenging. While you will receive ample mentoring, you are responsible for structuring the project and working with project managers and other teams. Wealthfront is dedicated to providing educational opportunities to the interns. You will have the chance to take mini-courses on general material and Wealthfront specific systems.
What is the most valuable thing you learned while at Wealthfront?
I’ve learned how data is stored and used at Wealthfront. It was useful to get an overview of all the various systems we have to facilitate offline data processing to improve the product for clients and to make data readily available for internal analysis. As Wealthfront continues to grow, it has been fascinating to witness how the data engineering team has been responsible for helping to scale the site by providing faster offline computations that are quickly served to clients. In my work, I’ve enjoyed using Spark and Amazon’s data services to process large amounts of data very quickly. It beats waiting hours for your machine to run your schoolwork!
What do you want the world to know about you?
If I were not an engineer, I would be making surf films.
Interested in working at Wealthfront? Check out our open roles!
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