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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Development Engineer

💰 $ - $

🎯 Role Definition

The Development Engineer is a hands-on, cross-functional engineering professional responsible for designing, implementing, testing, and delivering high-quality product features and solutions. This role spans software and/or firmware/hardware development depending on the product stack, and focuses on the full product development lifecycle (requirements, architecture, implementation, verification, deployment and maintenance). A Development Engineer partners with product management, QA, DevOps, and manufacturing to ensure scalable, secure, and performant systems that meet customer needs.

Core keywords: Development Engineer, software engineer, firmware engineer, embedded systems, product development, SDLC, Agile, CI/CD, system design, cross-functional collaboration.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior/Associate Software or Firmware Engineer
  • Test Engineer or Quality Assurance (automation focus)
  • Hardware Technician transitioning into engineering

Advancement To:

  • Senior Development Engineer
  • Lead Development Engineer / Technical Lead
  • Principal Engineer / Staff Engineer

Lateral Moves:

  • Systems Engineer
  • Product Manager (technical product owner)
  • DevOps/Platform Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead end-to-end design and development of new product features, writing clean, maintainable code and producing architecture documents that align with product roadmaps and non-functional requirements such as scalability, reliability, and security.
  • Translate product requirements and customer feedback into technical specifications, prototypes, and implementation plans, ensuring traceability from requirements through verification and release.
  • Implement and integrate firmware, embedded software, device drivers, or backend services depending on product stack, following established coding standards and design patterns.
  • Architect and develop APIs, services, and microservices with clear interface contracts, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility considerations for cross-team integration.
  • Build and execute unit, integration and system tests; create test harnesses and automated test suites to ensure regression-free releases and to accelerate continuous integration.
  • Diagnose and debug complex system issues using profiling, logging, telemetry, and root-cause analysis; implement fixes with regression safeguards and post-mortem documentation.
  • Optimize performance and resource usage (CPU, memory, power) across software/firmware layers for real-time, embedded, or cloud environments as applicable to the product.
  • Participate in design reviews and architecture discussions; provide constructive feedback and mentor peers on engineering best practices and trade-offs.
  • Create and maintain clear technical documentation, runbooks, and release notes to support engineering handoffs, manufacturing, QA and customer support teams.
  • Manage code quality with code reviews, static analysis, linters, and enforce test coverage and reliability metrics across the codebase.
  • Coordinate with manufacturing, supply chain or hardware teams for system bring-up, board-level validation, and hardware-software integration and debugging.
  • Implement CI/CD pipelines and automated build systems to streamline deployments, enable continuous delivery and reduce time-to-market.
  • Ensure compliance with relevant standards and regulatory requirements (security, safety, electromagnetic compatibility) by implementing required safeguards and documentation.
  • Design and run experiments and prototypes to validate technical approaches, feasibility, cost, and performance before full-scale implementation.
  • Evaluate and select third-party libraries, frameworks, sensors, or cloud services; drive procurement and vendor interactions to minimize technical risk.
  • Lead troubleshooting and field-support efforts for escalated or production incidents; drive root-cause analysis and implement long-term corrective actions.
  • Collaborate with UX/product teams to ensure that implementations meet user experience, accessibility, and usability requirements.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives for development processes, release cadences, and cross-team communication; measure impact with metrics (cycle time, defect rate, MTTR).
  • Implement security best-practices including threat modeling, secure coding guidelines, code signing, and supply-chain security to protect product and customer data.
  • Plan and estimate development tasks, identify dependencies and schedule risks, and communicate status to stakeholders and product leadership.
  • Mentor junior engineers, conduct technical onboarding, and lead knowledge-sharing sessions to build team capability and resilience.
  • Maintain and improve observability across systems by adding metrics, logs, traces and dashboards to accelerate debugging and performance tuning in production.
  • Perform design for testability and manufacturability assessments, developing test adapters, fixtures, and scripts to support production verification.
  • Integrate cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) or edge computing stacks as needed for telemetry, OTA updates, analytics, or backend services.
  • Drive technical debt remediation projects, refactoring legacy modules, and modernizing stack components to improve maintainability, security, and development velocity.

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.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficient in one or more programming languages relevant to the role: C/C++, Python, Java, C#, Rust, Go, or TypeScript — ability to write production-grade code and unit tests.
  • Embedded systems experience: RTOS (FreeRTOS, Zephyr), bare-metal development, interrupt handling, and hardware debugging with oscilloscopes and logic analyzers.
  • Cloud and backend development: REST/gRPC APIs, microservices architecture, containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes).
  • CI/CD and build systems: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Bazel, or similar; experience automating builds, tests and deployments.
  • Version control and branching strategies: Git expertise, pull request workflows, and experience with code review tooling.
  • Test automation and QA: experience writing unit, integration and end-to-end tests; familiarity with Selenium, pytest, Google Test, or equivalent frameworks.
  • Debugging and profiling tools: gdb, lldb, perf, Valgrind, Wireshark, or platform-specific profilers.
  • Software architecture and design: modular design, SOLID principles, design patterns, concurrency, and memory management.
  • Database and storage: SQL (Postgres, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis) fundamentals and data modeling for persistence and caching.
  • Security and compliance: secure coding practices, authentication/authorization (OAuth, JWT), and vulnerability mitigation.
  • Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, HTTP, sockets, BLE, Wi-Fi, CAN bus or other domain-specific protocols.
  • Performance optimization: latency profiling, throughput improvements, and resource-constrained optimization for embedded devices.
  • Scripting and automation: Bash, Python, or PowerShell for tooling, test automation and developer productivity.
  • Experience with telemetry, observability and monitoring stacks: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, or cloud-native equivalents.
  • Familiarity with Agile methodologies, sprint planning, story estimation, and JIRA or similar tools for backlog management.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving skills with a bias for data-driven decisions and pragmatic trade-offs between speed and quality.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication suitable for cross-functional collaboration with product, QA, operations and stakeholders.
  • Ownership and accountability — takes responsibility for delivery, quality and operational readiness of features.
  • Ability to mentor and coach junior engineers and foster a learning culture through clear feedback and structured onboarding.
  • Adaptability and curiosity — learns new technologies quickly and applies them appropriately to business needs.
  • Time management and prioritization, able to balance multiple tasks, deliveries and production support responsibilities.
  • Stakeholder management — communicates technical constraints and identifies compromises aligned with business priorities.
  • Collaborative mindset — works effectively in distributed and multidisciplinary teams.
  • Attention to detail and a focus on producing high-quality, maintainable deliverables.
  • Resilience under pressure during production incidents and tight release cycles.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in a relevant engineering discipline or advanced certifications in embedded systems, cloud architecture, or software engineering practices.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Electrical / Electronics Engineering
  • Software Engineering
  • Embedded Systems / Mechatronics
  • Information Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–8+ years of professional engineering experience depending on seniority level.

Preferred:

  • 3+ years building production software, firmware or systems in a commercial environment.
  • Demonstrated experience delivering features through the full SDLC, owning components from design through production support.
  • Proven track record working in Agile teams, with hands-on experience in CI/CD, automated testing, and performance optimization.
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