Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for MTS Software Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

As a Member of Technical Staff (MTS) Software Engineer, you are a core pillar of our engineering organization. This role is for a hands-on developer who is passionate about building highly scalable, reliable, and performant distributed systems. You will take ownership of critical components of our platform, from architectural design through to implementation and production operation. This role requires an innovator and a problem-solver who can navigate complex technical challenges and contribute to a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Software Engineer / SDE II
Backend Developer
Associate MTS Software Engineer

Advancement To:

Senior MTS Software Engineer
Staff Software Engineer
Engineering Manager / Technical Lead

Lateral Moves:

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
DevOps Engineer
Solutions Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Design, develop, test, deploy, and meticulously maintain high-quality, scalable software solutions, taking full ownership of the entire development lifecycle.
Architect, build, and operate highly available, resilient, and fault-tolerant backend services and APIs that form the core of our cloud platform.
Write clean, idiomatic, and maintainable code in languages such as Java, Python, or Go, adhering to team-established coding standards and best practices.
Engage in deep collaboration with cross-functional teams, including product management, UX/UI design, and quality assurance, to translate product requirements into elegant and effective technical solutions.
Take a leading role in the design and architectural definition of new features and systems, creating robust technical specifications and ensuring alignment with long-term platform strategy.
Contribute to the team's code quality and knowledge sharing by conducting thorough, constructive code reviews and actively participating in technical design discussions.
Proactively identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, optimizing application speed, scalability, and resource utilization in a distributed systems environment.
Actively participate in an on-call rotation to troubleshoot, diagnose, and resolve complex production issues, ensuring maximum uptime and system reliability.
Leverage containerization technologies such as Docker and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes to build, deploy, and scale microservices-based applications.
Build, maintain, and enhance continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to automate software delivery, improving development velocity and reliability.
Design, implement, and maintain efficient and scalable data models for various data stores, including relational (e.g., PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (e.g., Cassandra, Redis) databases.
Champion a quality-first mindset by writing comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests to ensure the correctness, reliability, and performance of your code.
Mentor junior engineers on the team, providing technical guidance, code review feedback, and support to foster their growth and productivity.
Decompose large, complex technical problems into smaller, manageable components and develop a clear, incremental plan for execution and delivery.
Design, implement, and document secure, versioned, and high-performance RESTful or gRPC APIs for both internal services and external consumers.
Apply expert-level debugging skills to troubleshoot and resolve intricate issues that span multiple services and components within a complex distributed systems landscape.
Implement comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting by instrumenting applications and infrastructure to gain deep visibility into system health and performance.
Collaborate closely with the information security team to proactively identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities, ensuring all software is developed in accordance with security best practices.
Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies, actively evaluating and prototyping new tools and frameworks to drive innovation within the engineering organization.
Create and maintain clear, concise, and comprehensive technical documentation, including architectural diagrams, API specifications, and operational runbooks.
Independently manage project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables within an Agile framework, ensuring timely and successful completion of technical objectives.

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.
Engage in proof-of-concept projects to evaluate new technologies and methodologies.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Programming Proficiency: Expert-level proficiency in at least one modern object-oriented language such as Java (with Spring Boot), Python (with Django/Flask), or Go.
System Design: Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and SOA principles, with demonstrated experience in designing scalable and resilient systems.
Cloud Platforms: Hands-on experience with major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and their core services (e.g., EC2, S3, EKS, Lambda).
Containerization & Orchestration: Deep knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for building, deploying, and managing containerized applications.
Databases: Solid experience with both SQL (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis) database technologies, including data modeling and performance tuning.
API Development: Proven ability to design, build, and maintain robust, secure, and well-documented RESTful or gRPC APIs.
CI/CD & DevOps: Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI) and Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation).
Core CS Fundamentals: Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis.
Monitoring & Observability: Familiarity with monitoring and logging tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, and the ELK stack.
Version Control: Mastery of Git, including branching strategies and collaborative workflows.
Networking: Solid understanding of networking principles (TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS).

Soft Skills

Problem Solving: Exceptional analytical and troubleshooting skills with a knack for solving complex technical problems.
Ownership & Accountability: A strong sense of ownership and drive, with a commitment to delivering high-quality results.
Collaboration: Excellent teamwork and interpersonal skills, with the ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team environment.
Communication: Clear and concise written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Adaptability & Learning: A passion for continuous learning and the ability to adapt quickly to new technologies and changing requirements.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant technical field or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

Master’s Degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Software Engineering
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3-8+ years of professional, hands-on software development experience.

Preferred:

Experience working on large-scale, mission-critical distributed systems or cloud-native SaaS platforms is highly desirable.
A track record of technical leadership, mentorship, and driving architectural decisions is a significant plus.