Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Golang Developer

💰 $100,000 - $150,000

Software DevelopmentBackend EngineeringGo (Golang)

🎯 Role Definition

The Golang Developer is a backend engineering professional responsible for designing, building and maintaining high‑performance, scalable and reliable software solutions using the Go programming language. This role typically involves working on microservices, distributed systems, cloud‑native architectures, integrations with databases and messaging systems, collaborating with product and cross‑functional teams, and ensuring code quality, performance and maintainability.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Software Engineer (Java/Node.js) with interest in Go
  • Backend Developer working on microservices
  • Data Engineer or DevOps Engineer transitioning to Go‑based back‑end

Advancement To:

  • Senior Golang Developer / Lead Go Engineer
  • Principal Back‑End Architect (Go & Cloud)
  • Director of Platform Engineering or Head of Backend Services

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Infrastructure Engineer specialising in Go‑microservices
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) using Go for tooling & automation
  • Full‑Stack Developer using Go on the backend and modern front‑end frameworks

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  1. Design, develop and deploy backend services and APIs using Go (Golang) to meet product and business requirements for scalability, reliability and maintainability.
  2. Apply Go’s concurrency model (goroutines, channels, sync primitives) and idiomatic patterns to build performant services handling high load and parallelism.
  3. Architect and implement microservices or distributed systems using Go, including RESTful APIs, gRPC services, message queues and event‑driven architectures.
  4. Integrate backend Go services with databases (SQL, NoSQL), caching systems (Redis, Memcached) and data stores to support efficient data access and processing.
  5. Write clean, idiomatic, well‑documented Go code following best practices, code reviews, unit/integration tests, and maintainable codebases.
  6. Collaborate with DevOps and infrastructure teams to containerise Go applications (Docker), orchestrate them (Kubernetes), and support CI/CD pipelines for continuous delivery.
  7. Monitor, profile and optimise Go applications: identify bottlenecks in CPU, memory, garbage collection, startup latency and network IO, and implement improvements.
  8. Participate in architecture and design discussions: contribute to choice of frameworks, libraries, infrastructure patterns and scalable systems using Go.
  9. Troubleshoot production incidents: analyse logs, resolve race conditions, concurrency issues, connectivity failures and performance regressions in Go services.
  10. Mentor junior developers in Go: provide code reviews, share Go best practices, provide training in concurrency patterns, promote maintainable code in Go.
  11. Develop and maintain technical documentation: API specifications, architecture diagrams, service contracts, deployment manuals and Go code documentation (Godoc).
  12. Stay current with Go ecosystem trends: evaluate libraries, frameworks, tools (e.g., Go modules, dependency management, linters), propose adoption and improvements.
  13. Work with product and frontend teams: define API contracts, ensure consistent communication between Go services and client applications, ensure user requirements are met.
  14. Ensure security, authentication, authorization and compliance are built into Go services: implement secure coding, validate inputs, manage secrets, enforce role‑based access and encryption.
  15. Implement data pipelines or batch/streaming systems in Go: transform data, preprocess, handle messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS) and large data throughput.
  16. Collaborate across global or remote teams: participate in sprint planning, backlog grooming, agile ceremonies, deliver in iterations, share Go knowledge across time zones.
  17. Conduct code refactoring and optimisation: reduce technical debt, update legacy Go services, migrate older Go versions or frameworks, improve reliability and maintainability.
  18. Implement and maintain Go tooling and utilities: CLI tools, monitoring/observability agents, automation scripts that help operations, development workflows or data processing.
  19. Participate in DevOps functions: define infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation), deploy Go services into cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), manage uptime, cost and region‑specific scaling.
  20. Contribute to a culture of quality: write unit, integration and performance tests in Go (testing package, table‑driven tests), maintain coverage, run benchmarks and support TDD/BDD development processes.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad‑hoc data requests and exploratory analysis of service metrics: request processing times, error rates, throughput and Go microservice performance analytics.
  • Contribute to the organisation’s technical and backend roadmap by aligning Go service capability with business objectives, operational scalability and future architecture.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate requirements into Go engineering deliverables: service endpoints, backlog items, deployment tasks and operational hand‑off.
  • Participate in peer knowledge sharing, Go developer workshops, code‑share sessions and cross‑team engineering training to build Go competence.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong proficiency in Go programming language, including idiomatic Go, modules, dependency management and Go standard library.
  • Deep understanding of Go concurrency primitives (goroutines, channels, wait groups, sync, context) and designing for parallelism.
  • Experience designing and building RESTful APIs, gRPC services or other RPC mechanisms in Go.
  • Proficiency with SQL and/or NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB) and Go‑database drivers/integration.
  • Experience with message brokers or event‑driven architecture (Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS) combined with Go services.
  • Proficiency in containerisation (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines and cloud‑native deployments of Go applications.
  • Performance tuning and profiling experience in Go: memory usage, GC tuning, CPU profiling (pprof), race condition detection.
  • Familiarity with version control systems (Git), testing frameworks in Go (testing package, Ginkgo/Gomega) and code review processes.
  • Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP or Azure deploying Go services: scaling, load‑balancing, multi‑region architecture.
  • Understanding of microservices architecture, service discovery, fault tolerance, resiliency, circuit breakers and deployment patterns in Go environments.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent communication and collaboration skills: work effectively with product owners, UX, QA, DevOps and other stakeholders in an agile team.
  • Strong analytical and problem‑solving ability: investigate complex problems, propose solutions, debug production issues and optimise services.
  • Attention to detail and commitment to code quality: ensure clean code, maintainable architecture and high standards in Go service delivery.
  • Time‑management and prioritisation: handle multiple tasks, features and bug‑fixes in a dynamic backlog, deliver on schedule under pressure.
  • Adaptability and continuous‑learning mindset: keep up‑to‑date with Go ecosystem, new tools, cloud services and best practices.
  • Mentoring and leadership potential: guide junior engineers, promote best practices in Go development, and help build team capability.
  • Ownership and accountability: take responsibility for service quality, deployment outcome, system reliability and operational readiness.
  • Strategic thinking and business awareness: align Go development implementation with business goals, user experience and scalability requirements.
  • Collaborative attitude: participate in peer reviews, share knowledge, contribute to team culture, work well in remote/distributed settings.
  • Customer‑focus orientation: understand user impact, performance expectations, maintain service reliability and user satisfaction.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems or related technical discipline.
Preferred Education:
Master’s degree or advanced certification in Go, distributed systems, cloud architecture or backend engineering.
Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Distributed Systems / Cloud Computing
  • Backend Systems / Microservices Architecture
  • Information Technology

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:
3–5 years of professional software development experience, including substantial hands‑on experience with Go (Golang) in production environments.
Preferred:
5+ years of experience as a Golang Developer with full‑lifecycle backend systems, distributed services, cloud deployments, architecting solutions and mentoring others.

Explore More Careers