Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Engineer

💰 $ - $

EngineeringSoftwareSystemsDevelopment

🎯 Role Definition

The Engineer role is responsible for designing, developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining reliable, scalable technical solutions that meet business objectives. This position spans system architecture, hands-on implementation, performance tuning, cross-functional collaboration with product and operations teams, and continuous improvement through automation, monitoring, and rigorous testing. Ideal candidates demonstrate strong technical competency across software engineering fundamentals, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, security best practices, and data-driven decision-making, while also coaching peers and contributing to technical strategy.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Engineer / Associate Engineer
  • Developer / Software Developer
  • Systems Analyst / Network Technician

Advancement To:

  • Senior Engineer / Lead Engineer
  • Principal Engineer / Staff Engineer
  • Engineering Manager or Technical Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Engineer / Product Owner (technical)
  • DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer
  • Data Engineer / Machine Learning Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the full software development lifecycle for complex features and systems, including requirements analysis, system design, architecture definition, implementation, testing, deployment, and post-release monitoring to ensure production reliability and performance.
  • Design and implement scalable, maintainable, and secure system architectures that meet both current and projected business needs, incorporating cloud-native principles (AWS/GCP/Azure), microservices boundaries, and API design best practices.
  • Write clean, well-documented, and testable code in one or more languages (e.g., Python, Java, C++, JavaScript/TypeScript), adhering to coding standards, design patterns, and automated testing practices to reduce defects and accelerate delivery.
  • Own and improve CI/CD pipelines and release processes (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI), including automating build, test, and deployment workflows to accelerate time-to-market while reducing manual errors.
  • Develop comprehensive automated test suites (unit, integration, end-to-end, performance, security) and collaborate with QA engineers to ensure high-quality releases and rapid regression detection.
  • Troubleshoot and resolve production incidents and outages using structured incident response practices, root cause analysis, and post-mortems, then implement remediation and preventive measures to avoid recurrence.
  • Implement observability solutions (logging, metrics, tracing) using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, or OpenTelemetry to provide actionable insights into system health and performance.
  • Optimize system performance and reliability through capacity planning, load testing, profiling, and targeted refactoring efforts that reduce latency, improve throughput, and lower operational costs.
  • Collaborate with product managers, UX designers, and business stakeholders to translate product requirements into clear technical specifications, realistic timelines, and measurable success criteria.
  • Conduct code reviews and mentor junior engineers, providing constructive technical feedback, fostering best practices, and promoting a culture of continuous learning and quality.
  • Implement security best practices across the software lifecycle, including threat modeling, secure coding, dependency management, and ensuring compliance with regulatory and organizational security standards.
  • Manage and coordinate cross-team dependencies and integration points, ensuring APIs and contracts are well-defined and backward compatible across releases.
  • Lead prototyping and proof-of-concept work to evaluate emerging technologies, tools, or architecture patterns, providing recommendations and migration strategies that align with business goals.
  • Drive technical debt remediation and platform improvements by prioritizing refactors, consolidations, and infrastructure upgrades that reduce maintenance overhead while enabling feature velocity.
  • Create and maintain up-to-date technical documentation, runbooks, and design artifacts to support onboarding, knowledge sharing, and operational runbooks for support teams.
  • Design and maintain containerized environments and orchestration platforms (Docker, Kubernetes), including deployment manifests, helm charts, and service mesh configuration where appropriate.
  • Integrate external systems and third-party services (APIs, SDKs, cloud services) while managing authentication, rate limiting, error handling, and contract validation to ensure robust integrations.
  • Implement data pipelines and ETL processes where required, ensuring data quality, schema evolution, and efficient storage/access patterns for analytics and downstream systems.
  • Participate actively in Agile processes (scrum, kanban), including sprint planning, backlog grooming, daily standups, and demos, delivering predictable increments of value and maintaining transparency.
  • Evaluate and manage vendor or contractor relationships for specialized work, ensuring deliverables meet quality, security, and timeline expectations while controlling costs and risks.
  • Champion accessibility, usability, and internationalization/localization considerations for user-facing systems to ensure broad applicability and compliance with standards.
  • Contribute to the organization's technical roadmap and strategy by identifying opportunities for innovation, cost savings, scalability improvements, and faster time-to-market.
  • Ensure effective change management, release coordination, and stakeholder communication for major production changes to minimize disruption and meet business SLAs.
  • Continuously monitor industry trends, open-source projects, and best practices to recommend and implement improvements that keep systems modern, secure, and competitive.

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 such as Python, Java, C++, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Go with strong foundations in data structures and algorithms.
  • Strong experience with relational and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra) and skilled in writing optimized SQL and data modeling for scale.
  • Hands-on knowledge of Linux/Unix system administration, shell scripting, and performance profiling for troubleshooting production issues.
  • Deep familiarity with cloud platforms and services (AWS, GCP, Azure) including compute, storage, networking, IAM, managed databases, and serverless offerings.
  • Demonstrated experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or similar tools.
  • Containerization and orchestration expertise with Docker and Kubernetes, including deployment strategies, scaling, and service discovery.
  • Proficiency with version control (Git), branching strategies, pull request workflows, and code review practices.
  • Solid understanding of software architecture principles, microservices patterns, distributed systems design, and event-driven architectures.
  • Experience implementing monitoring and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry) and using metrics/traces to drive decisions.
  • Strong testing skills: unit, integration, system, performance, and automated test frameworks and tools relevant to the tech stack.
  • Knowledge of security best practices: encryption, authentication, authorization, dependency scanning, and vulnerability remediation.
  • Familiarity with API design and management (REST, gRPC, OpenAPI/Swagger) and experience defining stable, versioned interfaces.
  • Background in performance engineering: load testing tools, profiling, caching strategies, and database query optimization.
  • Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible) for reproducible environments.
  • Practical experience integrating third-party services and SDKs, handling errors, retries, throttling, and reliable backoff strategies.

Soft Skills

  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a data-driven mindset for diagnosing issues and validating solutions.
  • Effective communication skills for explaining technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and producing clear documentation.
  • Proven ability to collaborate across cross-functional teams, manage expectations, and negotiate trade-offs between speed, quality, and cost.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance multiple projects, production support, and strategic initiatives.
  • Mentorship and coaching aptitude to uplift team capabilities, foster knowledge sharing, and support professional growth.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning mindset to quickly adopt new technologies, patterns, and business contexts.
  • Detail-oriented with a focus on delivering robust, maintainable, and secure solutions rather than quick, brittle fixes.
  • Leadership presence for driving technical discussions, making evidence-based decisions, and fostering an inclusive, high-performance culture.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in a relevant technical discipline or equivalent graduate-level coursework and professional certifications (AWS/GCP/Azure certifications, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, etc.).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Electrical / Computer Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Mechanical Engineering (for hardware/embedded roles)
  • Data Science / Applied Mathematics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7 years of professional engineering experience for mid-level roles; 7+ years for senior/lead positions.

Preferred:

  • Demonstrated track record delivering production systems, architecting scalable solutions, and leading or mentoring engineering teams.
  • Experience in regulated industries or with compliance frameworks (PCI, HIPAA, SOC2) where applicable.
  • Portfolio of technical contributions such as open-source projects, published designs, patents, or conference presentations is a plus.
Explore More Careers