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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Agile Developer

💰 $90,000 - $140,000

Software DevelopmentAgileScrumSoftware EngineeringIT

🎯 Role Definition

The Agile Developer is responsible for designing, developing, testing, and delivering software solutions within an Agile framework. This role collaborates with cross-functional teams, including product owners, QA engineers, UX designers, and other developers, to iteratively build and maintain high-quality software. Agile Developers embrace continuous delivery, respond to changing requirements, and actively participate in Agile ceremonies to ensure timely and efficient product releases.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Software Developer / Graduate Developer
  • QA Engineer transitioning to development
  • Full Stack Developer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Agile Developer / Senior Software Engineer
  • Technical Lead / Team Lead
  • Solutions Architect
  • Engineering Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer / Platform Engineer
  • Product Owner / Business Analyst
  • Agile Coach / Scrum Master

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain scalable, testable microservices and backend components using languages and frameworks such as Java (Spring Boot), Node.js, .NET Core, or similar, ensuring alignment with system architecture and product roadmap.
  • Collaborate daily with Product Owners, Scrum Masters, UX/UI designers, QA engineers, and other developers to translate user stories into technical tasks and deliver working increments each sprint.
  • Participate actively in sprint ceremonies — sprint planning, daily stand-ups, backlog refinement, demos, and retrospectives — to estimate, prioritize, and continuously improve team delivery.
  • Write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code following established coding standards and patterns; conduct and participate in regular code reviews to improve quality and share knowledge.
  • Implement automated unit, integration, and end-to-end tests (TDD/BDD) to deliver reliable features and enable fast feedback loops for the team.
  • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps) to automate build, test, and deployment workflows across development, staging, and production environments.
  • Design and consume RESTful APIs and GraphQL endpoints with robust versioning, documentation, and backward compatibility strategies using OpenAPI/Swagger specifications.
  • Containerize applications using Docker and manage orchestration with Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) or equivalent, ensuring repeatable deployments and environment parity.
  • Troubleshoot, debug, and resolve production incidents, performing root cause analysis and implementing monitoring, alerting, and remediation automation with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or New Relic.
  • Drive continuous improvement by identifying performance bottlenecks, refactoring legacy code, and recommending architecture enhancements to improve scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
  • Apply cloud-native patterns and manage services on AWS, Azure, or GCP — provisioning infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates) and optimizing cost and performance.
  • Collaborate with security teams to implement secure coding practices, manage secrets, and perform vulnerability scanning and remediation in CI/CD pipelines.
  • Lead or contribute to sprint-level technical design sessions and architectural reviews, balancing fast delivery with sustainable architecture and technical debt management.
  • Mentor and coach junior developers and peers on best practices, design patterns, testing strategies, and Agile principles to grow team capability and velocity.
  • Drive and support feature toggles, phased rollouts, blue/green and canary deployment strategies to reduce risk when releasing to production.
  • Maintain and evolve observability — logging, tracing, and metrics — to provide actionable insights for operations, feature performance, and user behavior analysis.
  • Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and onboarding materials in Confluence or other knowledge repositories to minimize single points of failure.
  • Participate in cross-team integration efforts, API contract negotiations, and data modeling to ensure consistent interfaces and minimize integration friction.
  • Estimate technical effort and risks for user stories and epics, providing transparent progress reporting and communicating trade-offs to stakeholders and product leadership.
  • Support backlog grooming by identifying technical dependencies, breaking down complex initiatives into deliverable stories, and coordinating with product and architecture stakeholders.
  • Foster a culture of automation, continuous delivery, and measurable outcomes by introducing tooling, metrics, and experiments that improve cycle time and quality.
  • Ensure accessibility, internationalization, and performance considerations are integrated into feature design and implementation where applicable.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc debugging and incident response across development and operations, contributing to post-incident reviews and corrective action plans.
  • Assist in defining non-functional requirements (security, performance, scalability) and build automated checks into CI/CD to monitor compliance.
  • Contribute to hiring, interviewing, and onboarding of new engineers; help craft technical assessments and evaluate candidate fit for Agile teams.
  • Collaborate with data engineers and analysts to expose business-critical data via APIs and services, and ensure consistent data contracts.
  • Participate in community of practice sessions (DevOps, QA, Frontend) and share learnings to elevate team-wide engineering capabilities.
  • Maintain and improve local development environments, tooling, and scripts to reduce developer friction and increase productivity.
  • Contribute to product roadmap discussions from a technical feasibility and risk perspective, advocating for pragmatic engineering trade-offs.
  • Provide cost and capacity planning inputs for cloud resource usage and suggest optimizations to reduce operational spend.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong programming experience in one or more mainstream languages: Java (Spring Boot), C# (.NET Core), JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js, React, Angular), or similar.
  • Deep understanding and hands-on experience building microservices and API-first architectures (REST, GraphQL) with proper versioning and documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger).
  • Practical experience with containers and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) and experience deploying services to cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
  • CI/CD pipeline design and automation using Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, or Azure DevOps, including automated testing and deployment strategies (blue/green, canary).
  • Test-driven development (TDD), behavior-driven development (BDD), and industrialized unit/integration/e2e testing frameworks (JUnit, Jest, Mocha, Selenium, Cypress).
  • Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates.
  • Experience with version control and branching strategies using Git (GitFlow, trunk-based development).
  • Knowledge of databases and data storage: relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL), NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB), and data modeling best practices.
  • Observability and monitoring: logging, metrics, distributed tracing (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Jaeger).
  • Security best practices for application development: OWASP, secure authentication/authorization (OAuth2, JWT), secret management.
  • Strong debugging, profiling, and performance tuning skills for production systems.
  • Experience with Agile tooling: JIRA, Confluence, Azure Boards for backlog management and documentation.
  • Familiarity with event-driven architectures and messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS) is a plus.
  • Experience with front-end frameworks for full-stack developers: React, Angular, or Vue.js.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent verbal and written communication to explain technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Collaborative team player who thrives in cross-functional Agile teams and values feedback and continuous improvement.
  • Strong problem-solving skills with a pragmatic, outcome-oriented mindset and attention to detail.
  • Ability to estimate, prioritize, and manage work under tight deadlines while maintaining quality.
  • Coaching and mentoring mindset — able to uplift junior engineers and foster a learning culture.
  • Adaptability and resilience in a fast-paced, changing environment.
  • Product-oriented thinking with a focus on customer value and measurable business outcomes.
  • Strong stakeholder management and the ability to negotiate technical trade-offs with product and business teams.
  • Proactive ownership and accountability for end-to-end delivery, from design to production support.
  • Continuous learning orientation — keeps skills current with emerging tools, patterns, and best practices.

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 field, or relevant professional certifications (Certified Scrum Developer, AWS Certified Developer, Microsoft Azure Developer).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Applied Mathematics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years of professional software development experience in Agile teams.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years building production-grade systems, with demonstrated ownership of end-to-end delivery.
  • Prior experience working in Scrum or Kanban teams, and a track record of improving delivery processes and quality through automation and best practices.
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