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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Software Developer

💰 $ - $

ITSoftware DevelopmentEngineeringTechnology

🎯 Role Definition

An IT Software Developer designs, implements, tests, and maintains high-quality software solutions across web, mobile, desktop, and cloud platforms. This role emphasizes full software development lifecycle ownership, collaboration with product and operations teams, and continuous delivery of reliable, scalable systems using modern languages, frameworks, and cloud-native architectures. The ideal candidate combines strong engineering fundamentals, practical DevOps knowledge, and effective communication to translate product requirements into robust, production-ready software.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Software Developer / Graduate Software Engineer with hands-on project experience and internships.
  • QA Automation Engineer or Systems Analyst transitioning into development and engineering.
  • Technical Support Engineer or DevOps Engineer who has developed coding and scripting expertise.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Software Developer / Senior Engineer (ownership of larger modules and mentoring).
  • Tech Lead / Lead Developer (architectural oversight and team leadership).
  • Engineering Manager / Software Development Manager (people and project management).
  • Principal Engineer / Staff Engineer (cross-team technical leadership and strategy).

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with a focus on CI/CD and cloud operations.
  • Solutions Architect or Cloud Engineer focusing on system design and deployment.
  • Product Engineer or Full-Stack Developer moving to product-focused teams.

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect, design, and implement clean, maintainable, and efficient code for backend services, APIs, and microservices using languages such as Java, C#, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Go, ensuring adherence to company coding standards and design patterns.
  • Develop and maintain responsive, accessible front-end applications using modern frameworks (React, Angular, Vue) with a focus on component-driven design, state management, and performance optimization.
  • Build robust RESTful and GraphQL APIs, enforce API versioning and documentation standards (OpenAPI/Swagger), and collaborate with API consumers and product owners to iterate on contracts and integrations.
  • Own the full software development lifecycle for assigned features: requirements analysis, design, implementation, unit/integration testing, code review, deployment, monitoring, and post-release support.
  • Collaborate with product managers, UX designers, QA engineers, and stakeholders to translate functional requirements and user stories into technical tasks, estimates, and implementation roadmaps.
  • Design and implement automated test suites (unit, integration, end-to-end) and adopt test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD) practices to improve code quality and prevent regressions.
  • Implement CI/CD pipelines using industry-standard tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, CircleCI) to enable fast, reliable builds, automated tests, and zero-downtime deployments.
  • Apply cloud-native design patterns and deploy scalable applications to cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) using managed services (Lambda, ECS/EKS, App Service, Cloud Run), infrastructure as code (Terraform, ARM, CloudFormation), and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
  • Troubleshoot and resolve production incidents, perform root cause analysis, create postmortems, and implement long-term fixes to improve system reliability and availability.
  • Optimize application and database performance by profiling code, tuning queries, adding appropriate indexes, and implementing caching strategies (Redis, Memcached) to reduce latency and operational costs.
  • Ensure security best practices are implemented across the stack: secure authentication and authorization (OAuth2, JWT, SSO), encryption in transit and at rest, input validation, and remediation of vulnerabilities identified by SAST/DAST tools.
  • Maintain and evolve microservices and monolithic systems, factoring code into modular components, refactoring legacy code, and applying domain-driven design (DDD) principles where appropriate.
  • Integrate third-party services and APIs (payment gateways, analytics, identity providers, messaging platforms), handling error conditions, retries, and idempotency safely.
  • Design event-driven architectures and asynchronous messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SNS/SQS) to decouple services, improve throughput, and enable scalable processing.
  • Participate actively in code reviews by providing constructive feedback, enforcing standards, and mentoring junior developers to elevate overall team delivery and code quality.
  • Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, API docs, architecture diagrams, and knowledge-base articles to support operational handover and cross-team collaboration.
  • Implement feature flagging and progressive rollout strategies to minimize risk during releases and gather user feedback through canary or A/B testing.
  • Collaborate with DevOps and SRE teams to define service-level objectives (SLOs), alerts, monitoring dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch), and log aggregation (ELK, Splunk) to ensure visibility and reliability.
  • Contribute to product and technical strategy by evaluating new technologies and proposing practical adoption plans that align with business goals and engineering capacity.
  • Lead or participate in agile ceremonies (sprint planning, daily stand-ups, retrospectives) to drive delivery commitments and continuous improvement across the development team.
  • Estimate development effort, prioritize work against product roadmaps, and balance technical debt and new feature development to maintain sustainable velocity.
  • Ensure cross-platform compatibility and platform-specific adjustments for mobile, web, and desktop targets where applicable, including responsive design, progressive web apps, and native wrappers.
  • Mentor and onboard new hires, conduct technical interviews, and help build a high-performing engineering culture through coaching, pairing, and knowledge sharing.

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.
  • Assist in designing data schemas, ETL/ELT processes, and pipelines for analytics and reporting.
  • Help define and implement observability for business metrics and event tracing across services.
  • Provide input into procurement decisions for software tools, cloud services, and development platforms.
  • Participate in compliance and audit activities by providing technical evidence and remediation steps for security and governance controls.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Programming languages: Proven proficiency in at least one backend language (Java, C#, Python, Go, Ruby) and one frontend language (JavaScript / TypeScript) — ability to write idiomatic, well-tested code.
  • Web frameworks and libraries: Experience with Spring Boot, .NET Core, Express, Django, Flask, React, Angular, or Vue.js for building scalable web applications.
  • APIs and integration: Deep experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs and GraphQL, including API design principles, authentication, and documentation (OpenAPI).
  • Cloud platforms & services: Hands-on experience deploying and operating services on AWS, Azure, or GCP, including serverless, container orchestration, and managed databases.
  • Containerization & orchestration: Practical experience with Docker and Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE) for packaging, scaling, and managing microservices.
  • Databases & storage: Strong skills with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server) and NoSQL solutions (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB), including query optimization and schema design.
  • CI/CD & automation: Experience building automated pipelines with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps, plus scripting (Bash, PowerShell, Python) for automation.
  • Testing & quality: Proficient in unit testing, integration testing, mocking frameworks, and automation tools (Selenium, Cypress, JUnit, pytest).
  • Logging, monitoring & observability: Familiar with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, CloudWatch, Datadog, and distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin) to maintain production quality.
  • Security best practices: Knowledge of authentication/authorization, OWASP, secure coding, vulnerability scanning, and patch management.
  • DevOps & IaC: Experience using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM) and collaboration with DevOps teams for reliable deployments.
  • Event-driven systems & messaging: Working knowledge of Kafka, RabbitMQ, or cloud-native messaging services for asynchronous processing.
  • Version control & collaboration: Expertise with Git workflows, branching strategies, and code review processes (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket).
  • Performance tuning & profiling: Ability to diagnose and improve application performance using profiling tools and database analysis.
  • Architectural patterns: Understanding of microservices, modular monoliths, CQRS, and domain-driven design for building scalable systems.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking to break down complex technical problems into deliverable tasks.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills to articulate technical designs and collaborate with cross-functional teams.
  • Product mindset with the ability to align engineering decisions with business outcomes and customer value.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance rapid delivery with technical quality and debt reduction.
  • Team player and mentor who provides constructive feedback, promotes knowledge sharing, and cultivates a growth mindset.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning orientation to stay current with emerging technologies, frameworks, and industry best practices.
  • Attention to detail and a bias for producing production-ready, well-documented deliverables.
  • Stakeholder management and negotiation skills to set realistic expectations and manage trade-offs.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline.
  • Professional certifications (AWS Certified Developer/Architect, Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer, Google Professional Cloud Developer, Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Electrical or Computer Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–7 years for mid-level Software Developer roles; 7+ years for senior/lead positions.

Preferred:

  • Demonstrated track record of shipping production-grade software, participating in system design, and operating services in cloud or containerized environments.
  • Experience across the full software development lifecycle, with exposure to agile methodologies, CI/CD pipelines, and observability frameworks.
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