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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Computer Software Engineer

💰 $80,000 - $170,000

EngineeringSoftware DevelopmentIT

🎯 Role Definition

This role requires a motivated Computer Software Engineer to design, develop, test, and maintain high-quality software systems. The ideal candidate will deliver scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions across the stack, collaborating with product managers, QA, DevOps, and other engineering teams. This role emphasizes hands-on coding, system design, and continuous delivery in an agile environment and is optimized for cloud-native architectures, microservices, and API-driven integrations.

Key focus areas include backend and/or frontend development, API design, cloud deployment, performance optimization, automated testing (unit/integration), CI/CD automation, observability, and technical mentorship. Strong candidates demonstrate experience shipping production software, owning features end-to-end, and improving engineering practices across the team.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Software Engineer or Software Developer
  • QA Automation Engineer or Test Engineer with strong coding skills
  • Systems Analyst, Backend Developer, or Frontend Developer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Software Engineer / Staff Software Engineer
  • Tech Lead or Engineering Manager
  • Principal Engineer or Solutions Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Data Engineer or Machine Learning Engineer
  • Product Engineer / Technical Program Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain robust, scalable, and secure microservices and RESTful APIs using industry-standard frameworks and patterns; ensure services are resilient, observable, and perform well under load.
  • Write clean, well-documented, and testable code in primary languages (e.g., Java, Python, C#, JavaScript/TypeScript) following SOLID principles and best practices for maintainability and extensibility.
  • Own features end-to-end: gather requirements from product stakeholders, produce technical designs, estimate work, implement code, deploy to production, monitor outcomes, and iterate based on feedback.
  • Collaborate with UX/UI designers and frontend engineers to implement responsive, accessible, and performant client-side applications (React, Angular, Vue) and integrate them with backend services.
  • Architect and implement CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI) to automate builds, tests, and deployments across multiple environments with safe promotion strategies.
  • Containerize applications and manage deployments using Docker and Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS) or serverless platforms (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions) to enable scalable delivery and efficient resource utilization.
  • Implement and enforce security best practices including authentication/authorization (OAuth2, JWT), secure secret management, transport encryption (TLS), vulnerability scanning, and dependency management.
  • Optimize system performance through profiling, caching strategies (Redis, Memcached), database indexing, query optimization, and asynchronous processing patterns (message queues, Kafka, RabbitMQ).
  • Design and operate data storage solutions using relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cassandra), ensuring correct data modeling, migrations, and backup/restore procedures.
  • Develop and maintain comprehensive automated test suites (unit, integration, end-to-end) and perform test-driven development (TDD) to reduce regressions and increase code quality.
  • Implement observability: structured logging, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), metrics (Prometheus, Grafana), and alerting to enable rapid diagnosis of production issues and SLIs/SLOs monitoring.
  • Participate in architecture reviews and design sessions to propose scalable, cost-effective solutions, perform tradeoff analyses, and document architectural decisions and diagrams.
  • Conduct and participate in code reviews, enforce coding standards, and mentor junior engineers to raise the team’s engineering maturity and productivity.
  • Manage technical debt proactively: refactor legacy code, improve test coverage, and modernize monoliths into modular services when appropriate.
  • Implement feature flagging and progressive rollouts (LaunchDarkly, feature toggles) to release features safely and collect telemetry for risk mitigation.
  • Integrate third-party services and APIs securely and reliably, handling authentication, rate-limiting, retries, and graceful degradation.
  • Troubleshoot complex production incidents, own on-call rotations when applicable, perform root cause analysis (RCA), and implement preventive measures.
  • Collaborate with product managers to translate business requirements into technical specifications, prioritize work, and deliver iterative value aligned with product roadmaps.
  • Drive performance and cost optimization in cloud environments, including right-sizing instances, autoscaling policies, and selecting appropriate managed services.
  • Ensure compliance with company policies and relevant regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS) by implementing data handling, retention, and privacy controls.
  • Contribute to developer experience improvements: internal SDKs, developer portals, onboarding docs, templates, and example projects to reduce time-to-productivity for new team members.
  • Lead cross-functional initiatives by coordinating with QA, security, operations, and stakeholders to manage dependencies and deliver complex programs.
  • Proactively research, evaluate, and pilot new technologies and tools (language frameworks, infrastructure-as-code, observability stacks) to reduce risk and accelerate delivery.
  • Prepare and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and API specifications (OpenAPI/Swagger) to facilitate collaboration and reduce operational friction.
  • Drive accessibility, localization, and internationalization efforts for global products where relevant to expand market reach and comply with standards.

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 and interviewing candidates, providing technical assessments and feedback.
  • Facilitate knowledge-sharing sessions, brown-bag talks, and internal workshops on coding best practices and system design.
  • Help maintain and evolve platform-level services that support multiple development teams (CI, logging, monitoring, service mesh).
  • Support performance and scalability testing initiatives and capacity planning exercises.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficient in one or more backend languages: Java (Spring), Python (Django/Flask/FastAPI), C# (.NET), Go, or Node.js.
  • Frontend proficiency with modern frameworks: React, Angular, or Vue and strong JavaScript/TypeScript skills.
  • Strong experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs and familiarity with GraphQL.
  • Deep knowledge of databases: SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB), including schema design and query optimization.
  • Experience with cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (compute, networking, managed databases, IAM).
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (Helm, Operators), and service mesh concepts (Istio, Linkerd).
  • CI/CD pipeline creation and automation: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI; infrastructure-as-code with Terraform or CloudFormation.
  • Testing and quality tools: unit/integration testing frameworks (JUnit, pytest, Mocha), test automation, mocking, and coverage tools.
  • Observability and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing.
  • Messaging and streaming: Kafka, RabbitMQ, SNS/SQS; patterns for event-driven architectures.
  • Security practices: OAuth2/OpenID Connect, JWT, secure coding, dependency vulnerability scanning, and secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager).
  • Performance engineering: profiling, caching (Redis), load testing (JMeter, k6), and capacity planning.
  • Version control and collaboration: Git workflows (GitFlow, trunk-based), code review tooling and branching strategies.
  • API documentation: OpenAPI/Swagger, Postman collections, and developer onboarding docs.
  • Infrastructure fundamentals: networking, load balancing, CDN usage, and storage options.

Soft Skills

  • Strong verbal and written communication skills for cross-functional collaboration and clear technical documentation.
  • Analytical and problem-solving mindset with attention to detail and the ability to break down complex problems.
  • Ownership mentality: accountable for delivery, quality, and operational health of services.
  • Collaboration and teamwork: able to work with product managers, designers, QA, and other engineers to deliver business value.
  • Mentorship: experience coaching junior engineers and contributing to career development of teammates.
  • Adaptability: comfortable with changing priorities in agile environments and learning new technologies quickly.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance feature delivery, technical debt, and support responsibilities.
  • Customer-focused mindset: empathy for end-users and data-driven decision-making.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Electrical or Computer Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Applied Mathematics or Computer Science-related disciplines

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–8 years for mid-level software engineer roles; 5+ years recommended for senior-level responsibilities.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years building production-grade distributed systems, microservices, or cloud-native applications.
  • Demonstrated experience in at least one public cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and CI/CD automation.
  • Prior exposure to system design, performance tuning, and production debugging, with examples of measurable impact (reduced latency, lower costs, increased reliability).
  • Experience leading projects or small teams, running design reviews, and mentoring others.
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