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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Web Application Engineer

💰 $90,000 - $140,000

EngineeringWeb DevelopmentSoftware

🎯 Role Definition

A Web Application Engineer designs, implements, and maintains web-based products that deliver excellent user experiences and meet performance, reliability, and security standards. This role spans frontend and backend responsibilities: building responsive user interfaces, designing and implementing RESTful/GraphQL APIs and microservices, optimizing application performance, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure. The ideal candidate translates product requirements into robust technical solutions, collaborates closely with product, design, QA, and operations, and evangelizes best practices in testing, accessibility, performance, and security.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Web Developer or Frontend Developer with 1–3 years of experience.
  • Backend Developer transitioning to full-stack responsibilities.
  • Software Engineer or Bootcamp Graduate with demonstrated project experience.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Web Application Engineer / Senior Full‑Stack Engineer
  • Tech Lead / Staff Engineer
  • Engineering Manager or Principal Engineer

Lateral Moves:

  • Frontend Engineer (specializing in UI/UX and performance)
  • Backend / Platform Engineer (focusing on APIs and infrastructure)
  • DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer (CI/CD, observability, reliability)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect, design, and implement scalable web applications and microservices using modern frontend frameworks (React, Vue, or Angular) and backend technologies (Node.js, Python, Go, or Java), ensuring maintainability and extensibility for future product growth.
  • Build responsive, accessible, and performant user interfaces using HTML5, CSS3, and component-based architecture with TypeScript or JavaScript; enforce accessibility (WCAG) and cross-browser compatibility standards.
  • Design, document, and implement secure, versioned RESTful APIs and GraphQL endpoints with clear contracts and pagination, filtering, and sorting capabilities.
  • Implement authentication and authorization flows (OAuth2, JWT, SSO integrations) and enforce least-privilege principles across frontend and backend layers to protect user data.
  • Optimize application performance end-to-end: client-side rendering optimizations, code-splitting, SSR/SSG where appropriate, query optimization, caching strategies (CDN, Redis), and database indexing.
  • Write clean, well-documented, and testable code. Create unit, integration, and end-to-end tests (Jest, Mocha, Cypress, Playwright) to ensure reliability and prevent regressions.
  • Own the CI/CD pipeline: author build scripts, define automated testing stages, and manage deployment flows using tools such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or Jenkins.
  • Containerize applications and manage deployment artifacts using Docker; collaborate on orchestration with Kubernetes (k8s) or managed services; work with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) where applicable.
  • Monitor application health and reliability using observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Datadog) and set up meaningful alerts and dashboards to detect and remediate production issues quickly.
  • Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, root cause analysis, and postmortems; implement fixes and systemic improvements to reduce MTTR and recurrence.
  • Collaborate with product managers and UX/UI designers to turn requirements and wireframes into high-quality features, providing technical estimates, feasibility assessments, and trade-off recommendations.
  • Refactor legacy systems and migrate monoliths to modular, testable services; plan incremental migrations to minimize user impact while improving scalability.
  • Implement secure coding practices and participate in security reviews, threat modeling, and third-party dependency audits to mitigate vulnerabilities and comply with data protection requirements.
  • Integrate third-party services and vendor APIs (payments, analytics, identity providers, messaging) and manage graceful degradation and error handling for external dependencies.
  • Design and maintain relational and NoSQL data schemas (Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB), perform data migrations, and optimize queries and transactions for concurrency and consistency.
  • Perform code reviews, mentor junior developers, and establish team coding standards, linting rules, and a shared component library to accelerate delivery and maintain consistency.
  • Drive product performance initiatives such as reducing Time-to-Interactive, improving Core Web Vitals, and optimizing bundle sizes and network payloads.
  • Implement feature flagging and A/B testing frameworks to ship experiments safely and analyze feature impact before full rollouts.
  • Lead or contribute to sprint planning, backlog grooming, estimation, and agile ceremonies; deliver predictable iterations and highlight technical debt and delivery risks early.
  • Maintain comprehensive technical documentation: architecture diagrams, API specs (OpenAPI/Swagger), runbooks, deployment processes, and onboarding materials for new team members.
  • Collaborate with QA engineers to define acceptance criteria, automate regression suites, and integrate testing into the CI pipeline to improve release quality.
  • Ensure compliance with privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA) by implementing appropriate data handling, consent management, and secure storage practices.
  • Continuously research and evaluate new tools, libraries, and frameworks, proposing technical improvements that increase team velocity and product quality.

Secondary Functions

  • Provide timely triage and debugging of production incidents, including rollback, hotfixes, and coordinated communications with stakeholders.
  • Assist in estimating effort and technical risk for upcoming features and enhancements, and help prioritize technical debt paydown.
  • Support cross-functional onboarding by creating sample projects, code walkthroughs, and cheat-sheets for architecture and common patterns.
  • Participate in security patching and dependency management processes to keep the application stack current and secure.
  • Contribute to recruitment by screening technical candidates, conducting interviews, and evaluating code samples and take-home assignments.
  • Help define SLAs/SLOs for critical services and contribute to capacity planning and cost optimization in cloud environments.
  • Work with platform and operations teams to streamline deployments, rollbacks, and blue/green or canary release strategies.
  • Maintain and extend a shared design system or component library to accelerate feature development and enforce visual and interaction consistency.
  • Collect and analyze telemetry, logs, and user feedback to drive iterative improvements and prioritize performance and UX work.
  • Serve as a technical liaison with external partners or vendors during integrations, ensuring conformity with standards and successful go-lives.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficient in JavaScript and TypeScript with a strong understanding of ES6+ features, asynchronous programming, and module systems.
  • Deep experience with modern frontend frameworks/libraries such as React (preferred), Vue, or Angular, including hooks, context, state management (Redux, MobX, Vuex), and component patterns.
  • Backend development expertise using Node.js/Express, Python/Flask/Django, Java/Spring, or Go, including building robust APIs, middleware, and background workers.
  • Strong knowledge of RESTful API design and GraphQL schema design, versioning, and performance considerations.
  • Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL stores (MongoDB, DynamoDB), including schema design, indexing, and query optimization.
  • Hands-on with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks (unit, integration, E2E) and test automation best practices.
  • Familiarity with containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and core services (S3, RDS, Lambda).
  • Understanding of web security principles (OWASP Top 10), secure authentication/authorization flows, data encryption, and vulnerability remediation.
  • Practical experience with observability tooling (logging, metrics, distributed tracing) and performance monitoring to maintain high availability.
  • Proven ability to optimize front-end performance: code-splitting, lazy loading, minimizing render-blocking resources, and optimizing critical rendering path.
  • Experience implementing feature flags, A/B testing, and experimentation platforms.
  • Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and cost-aware architectural decisions.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving skills with a pragmatic approach to balancing speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.
  • Excellent communication: explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and write clear documentation.
  • Collaborative team player who contributes to a positive engineering culture and mentors junior engineers.
  • Customer-focused mindset with an eye for UX, accessibility, and delivering measurable outcomes.
  • Self-motivated, organized, and able to prioritize work in a fast-paced, agile environment.
  • Growth mindset: embraces feedback, learns new tools quickly, and propagates best practices across the team.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science or related field, or completion of rigorous coding bootcamps plus demonstrable production experience.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
  • Mathematics / Applied Mathematics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–7 years of professional web application development experience (varies by level: Mid 2–4 yrs, Senior 5+ yrs).

Preferred:

  • 3–5+ years building production web applications or services, with at least some full‑stack ownership.
  • Proven track record of launching customer-facing features, improving performance/scale, and operating services in cloud environments.
  • Experience working in Agile/Scrum teams, contributing to planning, estimation, and continuous delivery.
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