Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Developer

🎯 Role Definition

As a Developer, you will design, build, test, and maintain software systems that deliver measurable business value. You will work across the full software development lifecycle, collaborating with product managers, designers, QA, and operations to translate product requirements into scalable, secure, and maintainable code. This role requires hands-on technical delivery, strong problem-solving ability, and a continuous improvement mindset focused on code quality, observability, and customer outcomes.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior Developer / Junior Software Engineer with 0–2 years of hands-on coding experience.
QA Engineer or Test Engineer transitioning to development.
Computer Science graduate, coding bootcamp graduate, or applied software engineering intern.

Advancement To:

Senior Developer / Senior Software Engineer responsible for technical ownership and architecture decisions.
Tech Lead or Lead Developer overseeing a small engineering team and delivering features end-to-end.
Staff Engineer / Principal Engineer focused on cross-team architecture and platform improvements.
Engineering Manager or Product-focused roles for those who move into people leadership or product management.

Lateral Moves:

DevOps / Platform Engineer working on CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and production reliability.
Data Engineer or Machine Learning Engineer focusing on data pipelines and analytics.

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Design, implement, and maintain robust, modular, and well-documented software components using modern programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#), applying SOLID principles and industry-standard design patterns to ensure maintainability and scalability.
Build and consume RESTful APIs and GraphQL services, ensuring versioning, backward compatibility, and clear API contracts for internal and external consumers.
Architect, develop, and deploy microservices or modular monoliths with a focus on observability, fault tolerance, and horizontal scalability; make data-driven decisions about service boundaries and responsibilities.
Write comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests using established testing frameworks to maintain >90% confidence in shipping frequent, reliable releases and reduce production bugs.
Implement CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI) to automate build, test, and deployment workflows, enabling continuous delivery to staging and production environments.
Collaborate with product managers and designers to translate business requirements into technical specifications, user stories, and acceptance criteria while providing realistic estimates and delivery timelines.
Perform code reviews, mentor junior engineers, and provide constructive feedback that improves code quality, enforces team coding standards, and accelerates onboarding of new team members.
Troubleshoot and resolve production incidents, perform root cause analysis, and implement long-term fixes and preventive measures to reduce MTTR and improve system reliability.
Optimize application performance by profiling runtime behavior, reducing latency, tuning database queries, implementing caching strategies (Redis, CDN), and addressing memory/CPU bottlenecks.
Design and maintain data models and schemas for relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB) databases; implement migrations and ensure data integrity during application changes.
Integrate third-party services and SDKs (payment gateways, identity providers, analytics, messaging) securely and reliably while handling retries, idempotency, and error handling.
Enforce security best practices across the stack: implement authentication and authorization (OAuth/OpenID Connect, JWT), validate inputs, manage secrets securely, and remediate vulnerabilities reported by security scans.
Contribute to architecture discussions and technical roadmaps by evaluating new technologies, conducting spike investigations, and documenting trade-offs to support long-term engineering decisions.
Implement feature flags and phased rollouts to reduce risk during deployments, gather telemetry during experiments, and iterate quickly based on real user feedback.
Develop, maintain, and improve infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and container-based deployments (Docker), ensuring reproducible environments across development, staging, and production.
Maintain comprehensive technical documentation, runbooks, and onboarding guides so that knowledge is shareable, recoverable during incidents, and useful for cross-functional teams and future hires.
Collaborate with QA and SRE teams to design test strategies, reliability goals (SLAs / SLOs), and run regular load/stress tests to validate architecture under realistic usage patterns.
Participate actively in Agile ceremonies—sprint planning, backlog grooming, daily standups, and retrospectives—to continuously refine delivery processes and remove blockers to team velocity.
Drive accessibility, internationalization, and localization efforts when applicable to broaden product reach and to ensure compliance with relevant regulations and best practices.
Maintain codebase quality by refactoring legacy code incrementally, reducing technical debt, and migrating away from deprecated libraries or patterns with minimal disruption to product delivery.
Lead cross-functional technical initiatives such as platform modernizations, observability improvements, or developer experience projects that increase engineering efficiency across teams.
Monitor application health and user metrics using observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK) and convert insights into prioritized engineering work to improve user experience and reduce churn.

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.
Provide mentorship and pair-programming sessions to accelerate junior developer growth and promote knowledge sharing.
Assist in customer-facing troubleshooting and technical escalations, translating technical details into clear next-steps and timelines.
Help create and maintain CI/CD templates, shared libraries, and internal SDKs to standardize implementations and reduce duplicated effort across teams.
Participate in hiring interviews, technical assessments, and candidate evaluation to grow a high-performing engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proficiency in one or more mainstream programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, Go) and idiomatic use of language-specific frameworks and libraries.
Strong experience building and consuming RESTful APIs and/or GraphQL services, including API design, versioning, and client consumption patterns.
Deep understanding of web front-end frameworks and tools (React, Angular, Vue) or server-side rendering where applicable for product needs.
Experience developing microservices, service-oriented architectures, and designing for eventual consistency and resilience.
Solid SQL skills and data modeling experience with relational databases (Postgres, MySQL) plus familiarity with NoSQL stores (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra).
Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) including core services like compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.
Containerization and orchestration experience (Docker, Kubernetes) and the ability to design container-friendly applications and CI/CD deployment flows.
CI/CD tooling expertise (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI) and experience writing automated pipelines for testing and deployments.
Practical knowledge of automated testing strategies (unit, integration, contract, and E2E testing) and tools applicable to the stack.
Version control expertise with Git workflows (feature branches, pull requests, rebasing, tagging, semantic versioning).
Familiarity with observability, monitoring, and logging tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK/Elastic Stack) to instrument and diagnose applications.
Experience with authentication and authorization standards (OAuth2, OpenID Connect, JWT) and secure coding practices to reduce vulnerabilities.
Infrastructure-as-code skills (Terraform, CloudFormation) and an understanding of how to manage cloud resources securely and cost-effectively.
Experience integrating third-party services (payments, SMS/email providers, analytics) and designing for graceful degradation during outages.

Soft Skills

Excellent verbal and written communication skills to translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable information for non-technical stakeholders.
Strong collaboration and teamwork orientation—works effectively across product, design, QA, and operations to deliver customer-focused solutions.
Demonstrated problem-solving mindset with the ability to analyze root causes, propose pragmatic solutions, and iterate quickly.
Time management and prioritization skills, able to balance feature delivery, technical debt, and operational responsibilities.
Ownership and accountability—takes responsibility for delivered services from development through production support and continuous improvement.
Adaptability to change and eagerness to learn new languages, frameworks, and tools as technology and business needs evolve.
Mentoring aptitude—willingness to coach peers, run brown-bag sessions, and help grow the technical capability of the team.
Attention to detail when implementing features, writing tests, and authoring documentation that others will rely on.
Customer-centric focus—keeps end-user experience, security, and privacy considerations at the forefront of technical decisions.
Conflict resolution and negotiation skills for balancing differing technical opinions and aligning teams toward a common solution.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field; or equivalent professional experience from coding bootcamps and self-directed projects.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in a technical field or advanced coursework in software architecture, distributed systems, or cloud computing; relevant professional certifications (AWS Certified Developer, Azure Developer Associate) a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Software Engineering
Information Technology
Applied Mathematics
Electrical Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

2–5 years of professional software development experience for a mid-level Developer role; 0–2 years for entry-level, 5+ years for senior/lead expectations.

Preferred:

3+ years building production-grade web or backend systems, demonstrated ownership of delivered features, experience with cloud-native architectures and CI/CD in production environments, and a portfolio of projects or contributions to open source or technical blogs that showcase problem solving and engineering judgment.