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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for MTS Software Development Engineer

💰 $ - $

EngineeringSoftware DevelopmentBackendCloudSenior

🎯 Role Definition

The MTS (Member of Technical Staff) Software Development Engineer is a senior individual contributor who designs, builds, and operates scalable, high-performance software systems. This role requires end-to-end ownership of features and services, strong system-design and algorithmic skills, hands-on coding expertise in modern languages and cloud platforms, and the ability to partner cross-functionally to deliver business impact. Ideal for engineers who drive architectural direction, mentor peers, and lead technical initiatives without formal management responsibilities.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Software Engineer / Software Development Engineer III
  • Staff Engineer (lower band) or Technical Lead
  • Experienced Backend/Full-Stack Engineer with proven delivery in distributed systems

Advancement To:

  • Staff Software Engineer
  • Senior Staff / Principal Engineer
  • Engineering Architect or Technical Lead for a platform domain

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) / Platform Engineering
  • Data Engineering or Machine Learning Infrastructure
  • Product Engineering with a domain focus (e.g., payments, search, core services)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect, design, and implement end-to-end, production-grade distributed services and microservices that handle high throughput and low latency, ensuring reliability, scalability, and operational excellence.
  • Own the full software lifecycle for assigned components: requirements gathering, design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and iterative improvement to meet SLAs and SLOs.
  • Lead system-design efforts for new features and platform initiatives, producing design docs, trade-off analyses, capacity plans, and API contracts that align with long-term product and infrastructure strategy.
  • Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code in languages such as Java, Kotlin, C#, Python, or Go; apply solid data structures, algorithms, and design patterns to optimize performance and resource usage.
  • Develop and maintain highly reliable RESTful APIs, gRPC services, message-driven architectures (Kafka/RabbitMQ), and asynchronous processing pipelines for cross-team integrations.
  • Implement robust observability: metrics, distributed tracing, structured logging, and health checks; analyze telemetry to drive performance tuning and proactive incident prevention.
  • Drive performance optimization and capacity planning for services, including profiling, memory and CPU optimization, query tuning, and cache design to support growth.
  • Design and enforce secure coding practices and platform security controls; perform threat modeling, vulnerability remediation, and ensure compliance with data protection policies.
  • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, automated build/test/deploy workflows, feature toggles, and blue/green or canary deployment strategies to enable safe, rapid delivery.
  • Troubleshoot and resolve complex production incidents; lead postmortems that identify root causes, corrective actions, and long-term prevention plans.
  • Mentor and coach other engineers on code quality, testing, architecture, and engineering best practices; provide constructive code reviews and technical feedback.
  • Collaborate closely with product managers, UX designers, data scientists, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into pragmatic, measurable engineering deliverables.
  • Reduce technical debt proactively by refactoring legacy modules, consolidating common libraries, and improving platform tooling to accelerate future development velocity.
  • Evaluate and introduce new technologies, frameworks, and tools; prototype and champion pragmatic adoption with measured ROI and migration plans.
  • Create and own detailed technical documentation including design specs, runbooks, on-call guides, and API references to support maintainability and handoffs.
  • Drive cross-team initiatives that require architectural coordination, shared contracts, and migration strategies across multiple services or product areas.
  • Implement resilient data storage strategies, selecting appropriate SQL/NoSQL systems, schema designs, and data partitioning/sharding approaches for durability and scale.
  • Enforce and evangelize software quality through unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing; maintain high test coverage and CI policies.
  • Participate in roadmap planning and sprint ceremonies; estimate feature complexity, lead technical planning, and defend architectural investments to stakeholders.
  • Design for extensibility and observability of feature rollouts: A/B tests, telemetry instrumentation, and success metrics to measure feature impact and regressions.
  • Collaborate with SRE and platform teams to define and maintain runbooks, incident escalation policies, and SLOs to minimize time-to-recovery and mean-time-to-restore.
  • Lead migration and re-platforming projects (monolith → microservices, on-prem → cloud, or containerization) with minimal user impact and clear rollback strategies.
  • Balance short-term shipping pressure with long-term system health by proposing and executing roadmaps that include reliability, security, and performance milestones.
  • Act as a subject matter expert for a technical domain (e.g., payments, search, authentication) and represent the domain in architectural review boards and cross-functional forums.

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 recruiting interviews, technical assessments, and onboarding of new engineers within the team.
  • Provide input into product prioritization by highlighting technical risks, dependencies, and opportunity costs.
  • Maintain and evolve SDKs, client libraries, and public-facing documentation to reduce integration friction for downstream teams and customers.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong programming proficiency in one or more languages commonly used in backend development (Java, Kotlin, C#, Go, Python, or C++).
  • Deep understanding of design patterns, software architecture, algorithms, data structures, and complexity analysis.
  • Experience building and operating distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures (Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar).
  • Expertise with cloud platforms and services (AWS, GCP, Azure) including compute, storage, managed databases, IAM, and networking.
  • Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL/datastore technologies (Cassandra, DynamoDB, MongoDB), including schema design and query optimization.
  • Strong knowledge of API design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), versioning strategies, and backward compatibility practices.
  • Hands-on experience with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, CloudFormation).
  • CI/CD tooling and automation experience: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, Bamboo, or similar; familiarity with automated testing pipelines.
  • Observability and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry, and distributed tracing tools.
  • Solid security fundamentals: secure design, encryption, authentication/authorization (OAuth, JWT), and secure handling of PII.
  • Experience with performance profiling, load testing, and capacity planning tools (JMeter, Gatling, Locust).
  • Version control best practices with Git, branching strategies, pull-request workflows, and code review disciplines.
  • Experience with message brokers, queues, and backpressure handling for high-throughput systems.
  • Familiarity with domain-driven design, event sourcing, CQRS, and transactional consistency patterns when applicable.

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication skills for technical documentation, design reviews, and cross-team collaboration.
  • Ownership mindset with the ability to prioritize work, drive initiatives to completion, and take accountability for outcomes.
  • Mentorship and coaching capability to grow engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and technical guidance.
  • Excellent problem-solving aptitude: break down ambiguous problems, weigh trade-offs, and make data-driven decisions.
  • Collaboration and stakeholder management: influence product and business partners while advocating for technical constraints and solutions.
  • Adaptability to changing priorities, new tech stacks, and evolving business requirements.
  • Time management and planning skills to balance feature delivery, technical debt reduction, and on-call responsibilities.
  • Empathy and user-focused thinking to design systems that meet both developer and customer needs.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related discipline, or demonstrable advanced certifications in cloud/platform engineering.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Electrical / Electronic Engineering
  • Applied Mathematics
  • Systems Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 4 to 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building production systems; typical MTS candidates often have 5–8 years or more depending on scope.

Preferred:

  • 6+ years building distributed systems or cloud-native services.
  • Proven track record delivering complex features end-to-end, leading technical designs, and owning production services.
  • Experience operating services in production as part of on-call rotations or SRE/ops collaboration.
  • Demonstrable contributions to architecture, open-source projects, or technical leadership outside pure coding tasks.

Keywords: MTS Software Development Engineer, Member of Technical Staff, senior software engineer, backend engineer, distributed systems, microservices, cloud-native, system design, APIs, observability, CI/CD, DevOps, scalable architecture, software architect, production engineering.

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