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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Backend Developer

💰 $90,000 - $160,000

EngineeringBackendSoftware DevelopmentCloud

🎯 Role Definition

The Backend Developer is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the server-side systems that power web and mobile applications. This role focuses on high-quality, scalable, secure backend services — including RESTful APIs, microservices, data persistence, messaging systems, and integrations with third-party platforms — while collaborating with product, frontend, DevOps and QA teams to deliver performant and reliable features.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Backend Developer / Backend Engineer I
  • Full‑Stack Developer transitioning to backend focus
  • Software Engineer with backend internships or backend-focused bootcamp

Advancement To:

  • Senior Backend Developer / Backend Engineer II
  • Tech Lead / Team Lead (Backend)
  • Staff Engineer / Principal Engineer

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / Platform Engineer
  • API Engineer / Integration Engineer
  • Data Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain scalable, well-documented RESTful APIs and GraphQL endpoints that serve millions of requests per day while ensuring low latency and predictable performance.
  • Architect and develop microservices using domain-driven design principles, including service decomposition, API contracts, and inter-service communication patterns (synchronous and asynchronous).
  • Build robust data models and data access layers for relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB) databases, optimizing schema design and queries for performance and maintainability.
  • Implement reliable event-driven architectures and integrate message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS) to support asynchronous processing, retries, and backpressure handling.
  • Create and maintain CI/CD pipelines for automated build, test, and deploy workflows using tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or CircleCI to ensure fast and safe delivery.
  • Containerize applications with Docker and orchestrate deployments with Kubernetes (k8s), managing configuration, autoscaling, and health checks for production readiness.
  • Write comprehensive unit, integration, and contract tests using test frameworks and maintain high code coverage through test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven testing where appropriate.
  • Perform performance profiling and optimization across the stack — identify hotspots, optimize database queries, tune caches (Redis, Memcached), and reduce API response times.
  • Ensure production readiness by implementing robust error handling, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and retry policies for downstream failures.
  • Implement security best practices across services including authentication/authorization (OAuth2, JWT), input validation, encryption at rest and in transit, and vulnerability remediation workflows.
  • Design and manage caching strategies (in-memory, CDN, distributed caches) to reduce load on databases and improve user-facing performance while preserving data correctness.
  • Develop observability and monitoring solutions: integrate logging (structured logs), metrics (Prometheus), tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger), and dashboards (Grafana) to enable rapid incident detection and root cause analysis.
  • Lead design and code reviews to enforce best practices, consistent patterns, and maintainable codebases; mentor junior engineers and drive continuous improvement.
  • Collaborate closely with product managers and frontend engineers to translate business requirements into technical specifications, API contracts, and delivery roadmaps.
  • Operate and maintain production systems, participate in on-call rotations, respond to incidents, and drive postmortem analyses and action items to improve reliability.
  • Migrate legacy systems and monoliths to modern architectures (microservices, serverless) while ensuring backward compatibility and minimal user impact.
  • Implement data retention, archival, and backup strategies in compliance with regulatory and company policies, and support data privacy and GDPR requirements where applicable.
  • Integrate third-party services and external APIs (payment gateways, identity providers, analytics) securely and reliably while managing rate limits and error handling.
  • Collaborate with DevOps and SRE teams to define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and to implement automation for scaling, deployment, and infrastructure management.
  • Maintain clear, up-to-date technical documentation, API specs (OpenAPI/Swagger), runbooks, and onboarding guides to reduce cognitive load and accelerate team productivity.
  • Drive cross-team initiatives such as platform standardization, shared libraries, and reusable service templates to increase velocity and reduce duplication of effort.
  • Evaluate and adopt new backend technologies and frameworks where they demonstrably reduce cost, complexity, or improve performance — conducting prototypes, benchmarks, and risk analyses.

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.
  • Assist in recruitment by interviewing candidates for backend and full stack roles and advising on technical fit.
  • Provide operational support for database migrations, schema changes and release coordination across multiple environments.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Programming Languages: Proficient in one or more backend languages such as Java, Kotlin, Python, Go, Ruby, or Node.js (JavaScript/TypeScript) with idiomatic use and performance awareness.
  • API Design: Strong experience designing and versioning RESTful APIs and GraphQL schemas, producing OpenAPI/Swagger specifications and client/microservice contracts.
  • Microservices & Architecture: Experience building and operating microservices, service discovery, API gateway patterns, service meshes, and domain-driven design.
  • Databases: Deep knowledge of SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL databases (MongoDB, DynamoDB), including indexing, query optimization, transactions, and data modeling.
  • Messaging & Streaming: Hands-on work with message queues and streaming platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS) and patterns for idempotency and exactly-once/at-least-once processing.
  • Cloud Platforms: Production experience deploying services on AWS, GCP, or Azure (EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, Cloud Run) and using managed services.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Practical skills with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and container lifecycle management in production.
  • CI/CD & Automation: Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines; scripting and automation using Git workflows, IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation) and release tooling.
  • Observability & Monitoring: Implement logging, metrics and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK) for fault diagnosis and performance monitoring.
  • Testing & Quality: Strong testing discipline with unit, integration, contract and performance testing; familiarity with mocking, stubbing and test automation.
  • Security & Compliance: Knowledge of secure coding practices, authentication and authorization protocols (OAuth2, OpenID Connect), data protection, and vulnerability mitigation.
  • Performance Optimization: Profiling, benchmarking, caching strategies, and capacity planning to meet SLAs and scale reliably.
  • Networking & Protocols: Understanding of HTTP/2, gRPC, TLS, load balancing and CDN integration for network performance and security.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Experience codifying infrastructure and environment configurations using Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation.

Soft Skills

  • Strong communication: Able to explain technical trade-offs to product, design and business stakeholders in plain language.
  • Collaboration: Works effectively in cross-functional teams, balancing speed and quality with empathy and respect.
  • Ownership & Accountability: Takes end-to-end responsibility for features, incidents, and long-term maintainability.
  • Problem-solving: Systematic approach to debugging complex distributed system failures and performance issues.
  • Mentorship: Coaches junior engineers and contributes to a culture of continuous learning and constructive feedback.
  • Prioritization: Balances technical debt, feature delivery, and operational obligations to maximize business impact.
  • Adaptability: Comfortable in fast-moving environments, adapts to changing requirements and evolving architectures.
  • Documentation discipline: Produces clear runbooks, API docs, and architectural diagrams to reduce team friction.
  • Stakeholder management: Negotiates scope, timelines, and technical trade-offs with product managers and other teams.
  • Attention to detail: Ensures high standards in security, data integrity, and code quality.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field; industry certifications (AWS Certified, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Data Systems / Distributed Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3 – 8+ years of professional backend development experience (varies by level).

Preferred:

  • 5+ years building production-grade backend systems, microservices, or distributed applications with demonstrable impact on reliability, scalability, and performance. Experience in cloud-native environments, running on-call rotations, and contributing to architecture decisions preferred.
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