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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Application Development Engineer

💰 $80,000 - $140,000

Software EngineeringApplication DevelopmentIT

🎯 Role Definition

The Application Development Engineer designs, implements, and maintains enterprise-grade applications and services. This role spans full lifecycle software development — from requirements analysis and architecture to coding, testing, deployment, and operational support — with a strong emphasis on scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions using modern cloud-native, microservices, and DevOps practices.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Software Engineer focusing on backend/frontend components.
  • QA Engineer or Test Automation Engineer transitioning to development.
  • Systems Analyst or Business Analyst with coding experience.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Application Development Engineer or Staff Engineer.
  • Technical Lead or Engineering Manager.
  • Solutions Architect or Principal Software Engineer.

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / Platform Engineer.
  • Full-Stack Developer or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable, secure, and testable software designs and implementation plans for web, mobile, or backend applications.
  • Architect, design, and implement microservices-based systems and RESTful APIs using best practices in domain-driven design, clear interface contracts, and versioning strategies.
  • Develop clean, maintainable, and well-documented code in languages such as Java, C#, Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, or other stack-specific languages according to team standards and coding guidelines.
  • Lead the full software development lifecycle (SDLC) activities including requirements analysis, technical design, coding, unit testing, integration testing, code reviews, and production deployment.
  • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps to automate build, test, and deployment processes across environments.
  • Design and implement cloud-native solutions using public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform leveraging managed services, IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), and platform best practices.
  • Implement robust authentication, authorization, encryption, and other application security controls in collaboration with security engineers to meet organizational compliance and data protection requirements.
  • Optimize application performance and scalability by profiling, tuning, and applying caching, queuing, asynchronous processing, and database optimization techniques.
  • Integrate applications with relational and NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB) including schema design, indexing strategies, and data migration planning.
  • Write comprehensive automated tests (unit, integration, contract, and API tests) and champion test-driven development (TDD) practices to maintain high code quality and reduce regression risk.
  • Participate in and enforce code review processes, mentoring junior developers through feedback, pair programming, and documented engineering standards.
  • Implement observability and monitoring solutions (metrics, tracing, logging) using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Elastic Stack, Datadog, or Application Insights to ensure production reliability.
  • Troubleshoot and resolve production incidents, performing root cause analysis and implementing long-term fixes, runbooks, and post-mortem documentation.
  • Design and document API contracts and developer-facing documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger), SDKs, and onboarding guides to improve developer experience and third-party integrations.
  • Collaborate with UX/UI designers and frontend teams to deliver responsive, accessible, and high-performance user experiences when applicable to customer-facing applications.
  • Implement message-driven and event-driven architectures using messaging systems like Kafka, RabbitMQ, or AWS SNS/SQS for decoupled, resilient integrations.
  • Drive continuous improvement of software engineering practices including branching strategies, release management, dependency management, and technical debt reduction.
  • Ensure cross-functional collaboration with operations, QA, product, and security teams to deliver features on schedule while balancing quality and maintainability.
  • Lead or contribute to proof-of-concept (PoC) and prototype efforts to evaluate new technologies, frameworks, and architectures for business impact and feasibility.
  • Manage feature rollouts using feature flags, canary releases, and blue/green deployment strategies to minimize user impact and enable rapid rollback when necessary.
  • Provide technical estimates, capacity planning, and sprint-level commitments as part of agile planning ceremonies; communicate risks and trade-offs to stakeholders.
  • Maintain awareness of industry trends, competitor solutions, and emerging technologies to inform strategic technical decisions and recommended improvements.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Create and maintain internal runbooks, deployment checklists, and knowledge base articles to streamline operational handoffs.
  • Assist in onboarding and ramping up new team members through documentation, training sessions, and mentorship.
  • Participate in technical recruiting activities such as interviewing, reviewing candidate code samples, and evaluating technical assessments.
  • Contribute to cross-team architecture reviews and help establish reusable libraries, templates, and internal frameworks that accelerate delivery.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong programming skills in at least one modern language: Java, C#, Python, Go, or TypeScript/JavaScript — with practical experience building production services.
  • Deep experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs and microservices, including API versioning, rate limiting, and contract testing.
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including compute, storage, networking, and managed services relevant to application hosting.
  • Proficiency with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes for scalable application deployment.
  • Hands-on experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps) and embedding automated testing.
  • Strong database skills: SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and familiarity with NoSQL stores (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis) and appropriate data modeling.
  • Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation and environment configuration management.
  • Familiarity with message brokers and streaming platforms like Kafka, RabbitMQ, or AWS SQS/SNS for asynchronous processing and event-driven patterns.
  • Experience implementing application security best practices: OAuth/OpenID Connect, JWT, encryption, secure coding, and vulnerability remediation.
  • Expertise with observability tooling: logging, metrics, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), and APM solutions for diagnosing production issues.
  • Solid testing practice: unit testing frameworks, integration testing, contract testing, and test automation strategies.
  • Source control and branching expertise with Git, including merge strategies, pull requests, and release tagging.

Soft Skills

  • Strong communication skills for collaborating with product managers, designers, and cross-functional engineering teams and for clearly documenting design decisions.
  • Problem-solving mindset with a focus on pragmatic, data-driven solutions and the ability to decompose complex problems into actionable work.
  • Ownership mentality and accountability for delivering high-quality software on schedule while managing technical debt.
  • Ability to mentor and coach junior engineers, provide constructive feedback, and drive a culture of continuous learning.
  • Agile mindset: comfortable working in iterative cycles, participating in sprint planning, retrospectives, and backlog refinement.
  • Adaptability and curiosity to learn new languages, frameworks, and cloud services as business needs evolve.
  • Strong prioritization skills and the ability to balance competing stakeholder needs and project constraints.
  • Collaboration and teamwork: works well in distributed teams and across organizational boundaries to achieve common goals.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a closely related technical field — or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or relevant advanced certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Developer, Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Computer Engineering
  • Data Science / Applied Mathematics (when data-intensive responsibilities apply)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years of professional software development experience building and operating production applications.

Preferred: 5+ years with demonstrable experience in cloud-native application development, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and production incident management. Prior experience in Agile product teams, mentoring others, and contributing to architecture decisions is highly valued.

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