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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Development Specialist

💰 $ - $

DevelopmentSoftware DevelopmentProduct DevelopmentProject Management

🎯 Role Definition

The Development Specialist is a hands-on technical contributor who partners with product managers, designers, QA, and operations to deliver high-quality software and product features. This role typically balances requirement analysis, detailed technical design, hands-on implementation, testing, deployment, and post-release monitoring. The Development Specialist acts as a domain expert for assigned features or services, driving end-to-end delivery within an Agile environment, improving development processes, and ensuring products meet functional, performance, security, and usability expectations.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Developer / Associate Software Engineer with 1–3 years of experience
  • Business Analyst or Technical Analyst transitioning into implementation-focused roles
  • Quality Assurance Engineer with strong automation and programming experience

Advancement To:

  • Senior Development Specialist / Senior Software Engineer
  • Technical Lead / Engineering Lead
  • Product Engineer / Product Owner (technical)

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Manager / Product Owner
  • Solutions Architect or Integration Specialist
  • DevOps Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end technical design and implementation of assigned features and services, including requirement breakdown, architecture selection, API contracts, and component-level designs that align with product goals and engineering standards.
  • Translate business requirements and user stories into detailed technical specifications, acceptance criteria, and implementation plans while collaborating with product owners and UX designers to ensure clarity and feasibility.
  • Write, review and maintain high-quality, production-ready code following coding standards, design patterns, and best practices for maintainability, testability and performance across the stack.
  • Implement and maintain automated unit, integration, and end-to-end tests; drive test-first practices where appropriate and ensure continuous automated test coverage as part of CI/CD pipelines.
  • Participate directly in sprint planning, backlog grooming, and daily Agile ceremonies, providing accurate estimates, identifying dependencies, and ensuring on-time delivery of sprint commitments.
  • Design, build and maintain APIs and integrations (RESTful, GraphQL, event-driven) with strong versioning, documentation, and backward compatibility considerations to support internal and external consumers.
  • Troubleshoot production incidents, perform root cause analysis, coordinate fixes, and document remediation and prevention plans to reduce recurrence and improve system resilience.
  • Optimize application performance and scalability through profiling, caching strategies, database tuning, and code-level improvements to meet SLA and SLO targets.
  • Collaborate with DevOps and infrastructure teams to define deployment strategies, maintain release pipelines, perform canary or blue/green deployments, and ensure smooth handoffs to operations.
  • Conduct thorough code reviews, mentor junior engineers, and promote engineering excellence by sharing technical guidance, patterns, and constructive feedback that raises team quality standards.
  • Implement secure coding practices, perform threat modeling for new features, and partner with security/compliance teams to ensure adherence to data protection, access control, and auditing requirements.
  • Develop and maintain detailed technical documentation including architecture diagrams, runbooks, API contracts, and onboarding guides to accelerate knowledge transfer and reduce onboarding time for new team members.
  • Lead cross-functional technical initiatives and small project workstreams, coordinating with product, design, QA, and other engineering squads to align priorities and deliver integrated solutions.
  • Drive product telemetry and observability efforts: define metrics, add tracing and logging, configure alerts, and use monitoring tools to proactively detect issues and measure feature impact.
  • Partner with data engineers and analysts to implement instrumentation, data pipelines and ETL tasks needed for analytics, A/B testing, and data-driven decision making.
  • Evaluate and recommend third-party libraries, frameworks and SaaS solutions; prototype and pilot new technologies to reduce time-to-market while maintaining technical soundness.
  • Manage technical debt by identifying refactor opportunities, scheduling remediation work, and balancing delivery trade-offs with product stakeholders.
  • Coordinate user acceptance testing (UAT) with stakeholders, gather feedback, iterate quickly on issues raised, and validate releases meet business acceptance criteria before production launch.
  • Support vendor relationships for outsourced components or integrations: define requirements, review deliverables, and validate interoperability and security controls.
  • Participate in sprint retrospectives focusing on continuous improvement of team processes, build/release cadence, and cross-team collaboration to increase velocity and quality.
  • Maintain a strong customer and user focus by partnering with product and support teams to triage user-reported issues, implement feature enhancements, and improve the overall user experience.
  • Ensure compliance with accessibility standards, localization requirements, and regulatory constraints when delivering customer-facing features.
  • Prepare and present regular technical status updates, roadblocks, risks, and metrics to product stakeholders and management, aligning on priorities and timelines.

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.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficient in one or more programming languages commonly used in product development (e.g., Java, C#, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Go) with a demonstrated ability to deliver production code.
  • Strong experience with RESTful API design and implementation; familiarity with GraphQL is a plus.
  • Experience with modern web application frameworks and libraries (e.g., React, Angular, Vue, Spring Boot, .NET Core, Django, Flask).
  • Solid knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL stores (MongoDB, Redis) including schema design and performance tuning.
  • Familiarity with CI/CD tooling and pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI) and experience automating build, test, and deployment processes.
  • Hands-on experience with version control systems (Git) and branching strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based development).
  • Understanding of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud platform services (AWS, Azure, GCP) for deploying and operating services.
  • Experience writing automated tests (unit, integration, e2e) and using test frameworks (JUnit, pytest, Jest, Cypress).
  • Proficiency in debugging, profiling, and performance optimization techniques across the stack.
  • Knowledge of authentication, authorization, encryption, and secure coding practices; experience with OAuth, JWT, or SAML is advantageous.
  • Exposure to event-driven architectures, messaging systems and queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS) and asynchronous processing patterns.
  • Familiarity with monitoring, logging and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK) and setting up alerting and dashboards.
  • Ability to work with data analysis tools and SQL for ad-hoc queries, reporting and deriving insights to inform technical decisions.

Soft Skills

  • Strong stakeholder management: able to communicate complex technical trade-offs to product managers and business stakeholders in plain language.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills for clear technical documentation, status reports, and cross-team collaboration.
  • Problem-solving mindset with a pragmatic approach to diagnosing issues and delivering reliable solutions under time constraints.
  • Collaborative team player who mentors peers, shares knowledge, and contributes to a positive engineering culture.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance feature delivery, technical debt, and operational responsibilities.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning orientation to evaluate new frameworks, tools, and development practices.
  • Customer-centric thinking with a focus on usability, performance, and measurable business outcomes.
  • Analytical skills to interpret telemetry, user feedback, and metrics to make data-driven improvements.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a closely related technical field; or equivalent practical experience and demonstrable coding portfolio.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or an MBA with a technical background.
  • Relevant professional certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Developer, Certified Scrum Developer, ISTQB Automation, Google Professional Cloud Developer) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Data Science / Applied Mathematics
  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) or similar UX-related degrees

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–5 years of hands-on software or product development experience; entry-level roles may start at 1–2 years with strong demonstrated ability.

Preferred: 5+ years of progressive experience delivering production software, ideally within Agile teams and in a cloud-native environment; prior experience shipping customer-facing products, microservices, or large-scale integrations preferred.

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