Pros: I joined Wealthfront as a new college graduate in 2013. I chose Wealthfront over my other offers after spending several hours talking to the VP of Engineering. I was really impressed and had a great onsite interview experience. The biggest pro of working at Wealthfront has been being surrounded by some of the best and brightest engineers that I've had the chance to work with. The engineering team has impressed me with not only their technical skills but with how helpful they were in helping me get settled in with other areas of my life, such as housing. I moved from the east coast, and several engineers helped me find a place to live by giving me suggestions about the surrounding areas and providing people I could talk to about the areas. Another important thing to me is the location of the office being walking distance from the Caltrain and the company providing Go Passes that allow you to either work or chill on the train instead of being stuck driving in traffic. Coming straight out of college, I feared I would be stuck doing grunt tasks to start my tenure. Instead, I was assigned to work on an ambitious project to help develop Wealthfront's data platform, which was in the very early stages of development at the time. I was given a great mentor who helped me hit the ground running while learning best practices. I have been able to work with a wide array of new languages and platforms where we tend to favor the latest proven technologies over being stuck on legacy platforms. The culture at Wealthfront keeps me happy on a daily basis, as I regularly go on walks with my coworkers to discuss ideas involving both work and life in general. In addition, I am able to have regular one-on-one talks with the VP of Engineering to discuss how things are going, such that I feel the company is consistently looking out to ensure I am working on projects I am interested in and growing as an engineer.

Cons: As an engineer, you will be on a rotating on-call schedule where you must be available 24/7. Understandable from a business perspective, still not fun.

Pros: Great career opportunity. It's the leader in its space and it's quite a unique niche for a startup to be in; not many companies are trying to solve the automated investing problem. You get to invest up to 250K for free for employees! Technology problems that you deal with are also pretty decent, although management can do better in ensuring all employees are equally effective and challenged, but it's getting there. Culture is very, very collaborative. You can walk up and talk to anyone, even the CEO or chairman. The CEO is very nice and has a great personality (my favorite person in the entire management team). All the engineers are also good people to work with, very helpful in terms of getting new members up to speed. Benefits are getting better. The snacks are getting better. There will also be free food coming soon. We get cards for Starbucks, Pete's, David's Tea, Fraiche, Yogurtland, Cafe Venetia, and some ice cream place, and it's all corp expensed. Awesome location, so close to all the great places to eat in Palo Alto. Don't ever feel bored or caged in at work; you can go out for a walk every couple of hours.

Cons: Wealthfront is growing very, very fast. Even the processes that are put into place are so that it can eventually scale up to a large number of people. Because of this, it's becoming less and less "startupy." It still has agile development practices, but the rapid growth and the need for clear processes can get a little challenging. Compensation isn't the greatest. They do try to underball you and then don't really negotiate. However, if you are in it for the long run and really believe in the company, then the stocks should make up for it. If you do want to excel, you will have to give it 110%. So, if you are looking for a chill career, don't consider Wealthfront.

Pros: I was there during 2014 and left in early 2015. There was a lot of growth while I was there, and from what I understand there still is, which is exciting for a startup. The people are pretty talented and there are lots of interesting things to work on. I'd recommend it if you are looking to join a fast-paced and interesting startup. For software engineers, one interesting aspect of Wealthfront is that their front end is in Ruby on Rails, while their back end is in Java. In the job market, there are lots of software engineers who know primarily one or the other (e.g., learned mostly Java in college, or learned mostly Ruby and JavaScript at a coder academy). If you fall into one of these groups, it would be pretty beneficial for you to work at Wealthfront because you'll get to learn the other area that you don't know as well. They also have some R code.

Cons: There are a lot of regulations in finance, which means you may have to do some extra things you wouldn't otherwise do. But that's just the price any company has to pay to be in this space. If you want to really "move fast and break things," you'd be better off at Facebook. Wealthfront doesn't want to break things. That being said, they actually deploy pretty often, which you can see at their /engineering page. The regulation is just one thing you have to keep in mind, but it doesn't substantially slow down their rate of progress.