Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Internet Developer
💰 $60,000 - $120,000
🎯 Role Definition
We are seeking an experienced Internet Developer to design, build, deploy, and maintain modern web applications and internet-facing systems. The ideal candidate combines strong front-end and back-end engineering skills, solid cloud and DevOps knowledge, and a user-first mindset to deliver performant, secure, and accessible websites and services. This role partners closely with product managers, designers, QA, and operations to translate requirements into robust, scalable, and maintainable code that drives traffic, engagement, and business outcomes.
📈 Career Progression
Typical Career Path
Entry Point From:
- Junior Web Developer (Front-end or Back-end)
- Web Designer or UI Developer moving into engineering
- QA Automation Engineer or Technical Support Engineer with coding experience
Advancement To:
- Senior Internet / Web Developer
- Lead Front-end / Full-stack Engineer
- Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with web specialization
- Engineering Manager or Technical Product Owner
- Solutions Architect or Web Platform Architect
Lateral Moves:
- UX/UI Engineer
- Product Engineer / Technical Product Manager
- DevOps / Platform Engineer
Core Responsibilities
Primary Functions
- Design, implement, and maintain responsive, accessible, and SEO-friendly web applications using modern front-end frameworks (React, Vue, Angular) and standard web technologies (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript/TypeScript), ensuring consistent behavior across desktop and mobile browsers.
- Build and maintain server-side APIs and services (Node.js, Python, Ruby, Java, or .NET), designing RESTful and/or GraphQL endpoints, defining clear contracts, versioning strategies, and performance SLAs to support web and mobile clients.
- Architect and implement secure authentication and authorization flows (OAuth2, JWT, SSO) and harden web applications against common threats (XSS, CSRF, SQL injection), working with security teams to execute threat modeling and remediation.
- Optimize page load times, time-to-interactive, and core web vitals using techniques such as code splitting, lazy loading, tree shaking, image optimization, prefetching, and service worker caching to maximize engagement and search ranking.
- Integrate with third-party services and APIs (payment gateways, analytics, CMS, marketing automation, social login) and maintain robust error handling, rate-limiting, and retry/backoff strategies for reliability.
- Own the end-to-end deployment pipeline for internet-facing services: CI/CD configuration, automated testing, environment promotion, blue/green or canary releases, rollback procedures, and documentation to ensure repeatable and safe releases.
- Design and maintain data storage and access strategies, including relational databases (Postgres, MySQL), NoSQL systems (MongoDB, DynamoDB), caching layers (Redis, Memcached), and search indexes (Elasticsearch), optimizing queries and data models for performance and scale.
- Implement observability: application and infrastructure logging, distributed tracing, metrics, alerting, and dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK) to detect regressions and reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).
- Drive technical design and architecture decisions for web platforms, collaborating with architects and engineers to define microservices vs. monolith boundaries, API contracts, and scalability patterns.
- Produce high-quality automated tests (unit, integration, end-to-end) using frameworks like Jest, Cypress, Mocha, or Selenium to maintain confidence in releases and reduce regressions.
- Maintain CI pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI), automate linting, formatting, security scanning, and dependency management to keep the codebase healthy and auditable.
- Implement internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) support to deliver multi-language experiences and coordinate with localization teams to ensure proper formatting and content flow.
- Collaborate with UX/UI designers to translate wireframes and prototypes into polished interfaces, iterate on usability tests, and ensure implementation fidelity to design systems and component libraries.
- Lead code reviews, mentor junior developers, and evangelize best practices for modular, testable, and maintainable code, including component design, state management, and accessibility (WCAG).
- Design and enforce web performance budgets, run continuous performance audits (Lighthouse, WebPageTest), and prioritize fixes in sprint planning to improve search visibility and user retention.
- Manage CDN configuration, asset delivery strategies, and edge caching rules to reduce latency and provide a consistent user experience globally.
- Troubleshoot production incidents, perform root cause analysis, create postmortems with actionable remediation plans, and implement long-term fixes to prevent recurrence.
- Collaborate with product managers to refine requirements, estimate work, break down epics into deliverable stories, and ensure feature scope aligns with technical constraints and timelines.
- Implement progressive web app (PWA) features—offline support, service workers, push notifications—where appropriate to improve engagement and mobile retention.
- Ensure compliance with privacy and regulatory requirements (GDPR, CCPA), implement consent management integrations, and partner with legal/security teams on data handling and retention policies.
- Manage version control (Git) workflows, branching strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based), and release tagging to keep deployments predictable and developer collaboration efficient.
- Research, prototype, and evaluate new web technologies, frameworks, and tooling; propose migrations or incremental adoption plans where they deliver measurable business value.
- Create and maintain technical documentation, API specs (OpenAPI/Swagger), runbooks, architecture diagrams, and onboarding guides that enable fast developer ramp-up and cross-team collaboration.
- Collaborate with SEO, growth, and analytics teams to implement structured data, meta tags, canonicalization, and measurable telemetry that improves organic traffic and conversion rates.
- Participate actively in sprint planning, estimation, standups, retrospectives, and cross-team planning to ensure alignment and continuous improvement in delivery cadence.
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)
- HTML5, semantic markup, and strong CSS3 skills including Flexbox, Grid, responsive design patterns, and modern pre-processors (Sass, PostCSS).
- JavaScript (ES6+) and TypeScript proficiency; deep understanding of closures, async/await, event loop, and modular code patterns.
- Experience with at least one modern front-end framework/library: React (including hooks, context, Redux/MobX), Vue.js, or Angular.
- Server-side development with Node.js/Express, Python (Django/Flask), Ruby on Rails, Java (Spring), or .NET Core; familiarity with building RESTful and GraphQL APIs.
- Proficiency with relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB) databases and writing optimized SQL queries and schema design.
- Version control with Git and experience with code review processes and branching strategies; familiarity with GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.
- CI/CD pipelines and automation (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI); experience automating build/test/deploy stages.
- Containerization and orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes or managed container services; deploying web applications to cloud environments.
- Cloud platforms and services: AWS (EC2, S3, CloudFront, Lambda, RDS), Google Cloud, or Azure; infrastructure-as-code familiarity (Terraform, CloudFormation).
- Web performance optimization: caching strategies, CDNs, compression, bundlers (Webpack, Rollup, Vite), and code-splitting best practices.
- Testing frameworks and practices: unit testing (Jest, Mocha), integration testing, and end-to-end testing (Cypress, Playwright, Selenium).
- Security best practices for web applications: encryption, secure headers, OWASP principles, and dependency vulnerability scanning.
- Observability tooling: logging, metrics, tracing (ELK/EFK, Datadog, Prometheus, Jaeger) and incident response playbooks.
- SEO fundamentals: meta tags, structured data (JSON-LD), canonical URLs, sitemap generation, server-side rendering (SSR) and prerendering strategies.
Soft Skills
- Strong verbal and written communication to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and produce clear documentation.
- Problem-solving mindset with the ability to diagnose complex production issues and propose pragmatic, long-term solutions.
- Collaborative team player who can work across product, design, QA, and operations to deliver business value.
- Time management and prioritization skills to balance feature work, technical debt, and incident response.
- Attention to detail, especially in accessibility, cross-browser compatibility, and security.
- Mentorship and coaching to develop junior engineers and raise team engineering standards.
- Adaptability and continuous learning to rapidly adopt new tools and respond to shifting business priorities.
- User empathy and product thinking to balance performance, accessibility, and business requirements.
- Proactive ownership mindset—takes responsibility for systems in production and drives improvements end-to-end.
- Analytical mindset with data-informed decision making and experience using analytics to measure impact.
Education & Experience
Educational Background
Minimum Education:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience (bootcamp + demonstrated work history).
Preferred Education:
- Master's degree in Computer Science or related discipline, or specialized certifications (AWS Certified Developer, Google Cloud Professional, Certified Scrum Developer) and relevant coursework in web architecture and security.
Relevant Fields of Study:
- Computer Science
- Software Engineering
- Information Systems
- Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
- Web Design and Development
Experience Requirements
Typical Experience Range: 2–6 years building production web applications, APIs, and cloud-hosted services; 3+ years recommended for roles with end-to-end ownership.
Preferred: 5+ years of professional experience for senior roles, including demonstrable history of leading projects, designing scalable web architectures, and owning production deployments. Experience across both front-end and back-end domains or proven full-stack proficiency is highly desirable.