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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Microservices Developer

💰 $95,000 - $150,000

TechnologySoftware DevelopmentBackend EngineeringCloud Computing

🎯 Role Definition

The Microservices Developer is a specialized software engineer responsible for designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining scalable, distributed, and cloud-native microservices. This role requires translating business requirements into modular service-based architectures, ensuring high performance, resilience, and security. The developer collaborates closely with architects, product owners, DevOps, and QA teams to implement robust service interfaces, manage inter-service communication, and integrate with external systems. In addition to hands-on coding, the Microservices Developer mentors junior engineers, reviews code, drives best practices, and continuously improves the microservices ecosystem to support the organization’s strategic goals.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Backend Developer – Microservices
  • Software Engineer – Distributed Systems
  • Cloud Services Developer

Advancement To:

  • Lead Microservices Architect
  • Senior Engineering Manager – Microservices Platform
  • Director of Cloud‑Services Architecture

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps/Platform Engineer – Microservices Focus
  • Full‑Stack Microservices Developer
  • Solutions Architect – Microservices and APIs

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  1. Design, implement and deploy microservices‑based solutions using frameworks such as Spring Boot, .NET Core, Node.js or Python, aligned with service boundaries, domain driven design and business capabilities.
  2. Define and build RESTful APIs and/or event‑driven interfaces between microservices, ensuring well‑defined contracts, versioning and backward‑compatibility.
  3. Collaborate with product, UX/UI and architecture teams to translate business requirements into technical design, service decomposition and measurable delivery milestones.
  4. Implement containerisation (e.g., Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes, OpenShift) and cloud deployment strategies (AWS, Azure, GCP) for microservices at scale.
  5. Architect services for high performance, scalability, resilience, security and fault‑tolerance including caching strategies, circuit‑breaking, retry/back‑off, rate‑limiting and message queues.
  6. Lead refactoring efforts: decompose monoliths into microservices, migrate legacy systems to distributed architectures and define the roadmap for service evolution.
  7. Ensure the microservices deliverable meets operational requirements: uptime, latency, throughput, observability (logs/traces/metrics) and is supported with monitoring and alerting frameworks (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.).
  8. Develop and maintain technical documentation: service design documents, interface definitions, run‑books, deployment guides, API catalogs and version history.
  9. Participate in code reviews, mentor junior developers, provide guidance on patterns and algorithms, and elevate team code quality and maintainability.
  10. Create, manage and optimise CI/CD pipelines, automated builds, unit/integration tests, staging/production deployments and rolling updates.
  11. Troubleshoot production issues: perform root‑cause analysis, fix microservices in distributed environments, design mitigations to prevent recurrence.
  12. Define and enforce best practices for microservices architecture: service granularity, data‑ownership, API gateways, message brokers, datastores per service, event sourcing where applicable.
  13. Manage data persistence solutions for microservices: selecting relational vs NoSQL databases, defining schema, modelling domain, optimising queries and ensuring data integrity.
  14. Integrate microservices with external systems and third‑party APIs, manage async communication, transformation of data (e.g., XML/JSON), webhooks, and message queues.
  15. Work in Agile/Scrum/Kanban teams: participate in sprint planning, daily stand‑ups, retrospectives, backlog grooming and deliver features iteratively.
  16. Drive continuous improvement: evaluate new tools, frameworks, processes, automate manual tasks, reduce technical debt and improve service delivery velocity.
  17. Align microservices architecture with organisational security, compliance and governance policies: ensure authentication/authorization (e.g., OAuth2, JWT), encryption, and secure data transit.
  18. Collaborate with DevOps and infrastructure teams to manage environment setup, service discovery, configuration management, and logging/tracing across distributed services.
  19. Provide performance tuning and optimization: profiling services, identifying bottlenecks, implementing caching (Redis, Memcached), asynchronous processing, load balancing and horizontal scaling.
  20. Provide stakeholder communication: articulate technical direction, service status, risks, impacts and roadmap to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad‑hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis within microservices contexts.
  • Contribute to the organisation’s data and services strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data and service requirements into engineering tasks.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the broader engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Advanced proficiency in programming languages suited to microservices such as Java (Spring Boot), C# (.NET Core), Python, Node.js.
  • Experience designing and building microservices‑based architectures, employing domain driven design (DDD), CQRS, event‑driven patterns and service orchestration.
  • Strong experience with containerisation (Docker), orchestration tools (Kubernetes, OpenShift) and cloud deployment platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
  • Solid knowledge of API development (RESTful, gRPC, GraphQL), versioning, service discovery, feature toggles and backward compatibility.
  • Proven ability to built automated CI/CD pipelines, testing frameworks (unit, integration, end‑to‑end) and maintain high code quality in distributed systems.
  • Experience with messaging middleware, asynchronous communication, data streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ) and microservice patterns like saga, circuit‑breaker.
  • Familiarity with data persistence in microservices: relational (PostgreSQL, Oracle) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra) databases; data modelling and query optimisation.
  • Experience implementing monitoring, logging, tracing frameworks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack) and shaping SLA/performance metrics for services.
  • Knowledge of security best practices for services: authentication/authorization mechanisms (OAuth2/JWT), encryption, API gateway security, and compliance.
  • Strong understanding of cloud‑native development: microservices lifecycle, deployment strategies (blue/green, canary), service meshes (Istio), environment management.

Soft Skills

  • Leadership and mentoring: ability to guide less experienced engineers, perform reviews, and foster continuous learning.
  • Strategic thinking: aligning service architecture with business goals, evaluating long‑term maintainability and scalability.
  • Excellent communication: effectively articulate technical concepts, status and risks to business, product and engineering stakeholders.
  • Problem‑solving and critical thinking: diagnose complex distributed‑systems issues, propose robust and practical solutions.
  • Ownership and accountability: take responsibility for service quality, uptime, performance and delivery commitments.
  • Collaboration: work seamlessly across product, QA, DevOps, infrastructure and cross‑team boundaries in an agile environment.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning: stay current with microservices trends, frameworks, cloud capabilities and embrace change.
  • Time‑management and prioritisation: balance immediate delivery pressures with architecture, technical debt and future‑proofing.
  • Customer‑focus: understand business needs, user impact of services and deliver value through backend architecture.
  • Quality mindset: insist on clean code, thorough testing, documentation, performance and maintainability rather than just delivery.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology or equivalent.
Preferred Education:
Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or related discipline is a plus.
Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:
4 – 8 years of professional software development experience with a focus on distributed systems and microservices.
Preferred:
Proven track record of designing and building cloud‑native microservices for high‑scale applications, migrating monoliths to microservices architecture and mentoring teams.

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