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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Full Stack Software Developer

💰 $90,000 - $150,000

Full StackWeb DevelopmentBackendFrontendJavaScriptPythonNode.jsReact

🎯 Role Definition

A Full Stack Software Developer is responsible for developing, maintaining, and optimising both frontend and backend systems to deliver fully functional applications. They collaborate closely with designers, product managers, QA, and DevOps to ensure code quality, scalability, and performance. The role involves designing APIs, databases, server-side logic, and intuitive user interfaces while contributing to architecture decisions, best practices, and development standards.


📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Front‑End Developer or Back‑End Developer
  • Web Developer with full‑stack interest
  • Software Engineer specialising in either client‑side or server‑side development

Advancement To:

  • Senior Full Stack Software Developer
  • Lead Full Stack Engineer / Technical Lead
  • Solutions Architect / Head of Software Engineering

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer with full stack mindset
  • API/Microservices Developer
  • Platform Engineer focusing on end‑to‑end systems

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  1. Collaborate with stakeholders to gather functional and non‑functional requirements, translate them into architecture and code, and ensure alignment with business strategy.
  2. Design, develop and maintain front‑end applications using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript/TypeScript and modern frameworks such as React, Angular or Vue.js.
  3. Build and maintain robust back‑end services and APIs using technologies such as Node.js, Python, Java, Ruby or PHP, enabling data flow and business logic.
  4. Implement, optimise and manage relational and NoSQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis) including schema design, queries, migrations and performance tuning.
  5. Develop end‑to‑end features from database to UI, including workflow, security, error‑handling, caching and scalability concerns.
  6. Integrate third‑party services, microservices, RESTful and GraphQL APIs, ensuring seamless data exchange and system interoperability.
  7. Implement CI/CD pipelines, automated builds and deployments, and manage environment configuration (Dev/UAT/Prod) to support agile delivery and frequent releases.
  8. Monitor, troubleshoot and optimise application performance—including server response times, front‑end render speed, memory and database load issues—to deliver high‑performing solutions.
  9. Maintain version control systems (e.g., Git), follow branching strategies, code review processes and collaborate with other developers to maintain code quality and consistency.
  10. Ensure cross‑browser and cross‑device compatibility for web applications, deploy responsive UI designs and mobile‑friendly layouts aligned to business requirements.
  11. Participate in Agile/Scrum ceremonies: sprint planning, backlog grooming, daily stand‑ups, demos and retrospectives to deliver value iteratively and efficiently.
  12. Write and maintain technical documentation, architecture diagrams, code comments, API specifications and user‑guides to enable team knowledge sharing and system maintainability.
  13. Refactor legacy systems, migrate older architecture to newer, maintainable stacks, reduce technical debt and apply best practices in software engineering.
  14. Implement security best‑practices into development workflows: authentication, authorization, data encryption, input validation, and secure session management.
  15. Collaborate with DevOps, infrastructure and QA teams to deploy applications into cloud or on‑premise environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) and support high‑availability architectures.
  16. Mentor junior engineers, provide code reviews, promote standards, share knowledge and help raise team capability and productivity.
  17. Analyse product feedback, user behaviour, system logs and stack metrics to recommend and implement improvements, optimisations and new features.
  18. Architect reusable components, modules and libraries that accelerate time‑to‑market, increase consistency and reduce duplication across the stack.
  19. Manage full software lifecycle—from conception and requirement gathering through design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance and continuous improvement.
  20. Adapt and learn new frameworks, methodologies, programming languages, libraries and trends in full‑stack development, share insights and apply them to enhance the organisation’s technology stack.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad‑hoc tasks such as proof‑of‑concepts, technical spikes, internal tooling enhancements and data pipelines that cut across front and back end.
  • Contribute to the organisation’s technology roadmap, participate in architecture reviews and propose adoption of new tools or frameworks.
  • Collaborate with product, business and data teams to translate requirements into engineering tasks, prioritise backlog items and align feature delivery with business needs.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficiency in front‑end technologies including HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript/TypeScript and frameworks like React, Angular or Vue.js.
  • Strong back‑end development experience using one or more languages (Node.js, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP) and frameworks like Express, Spring Boot, Django, Rails.
  • Solid database and data‑store skills: relational (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle) or NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra) plus experience with schema design, query optimisation and migrations.
  • Experience building and consuming RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs, and integrating with external systems or microservices architecture.
  • Familiarity with version control (e.g., Git), branching and merging strategies, and collaboration workflows.
  • Competency with CI/CD, automated builds, testing frameworks (unit, integration, end‑to‑end) and DevOps practices.
  • Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes) and deployment/infra automation is desirable.
  • Good understanding of software security, performance tuning, responsive design, cross‑platform compatibility and accessibility standards.
  • Ability to write technical documentation, design diagrams and communicate architecture and design decisions to the team.
  • Experience with monitoring, logging, metrics, debugging and troubleshooting full‑stack applications in production environments.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent communication and collaboration skills—able to work with product, design, QA, operations and business stakeholders.
  • Analytical and problem‑solving mindset with attention to detail and practical approach to technical challenges.
  • Ability to manage multiple concurrent tasks and priorities, work effectively in agile teams and meet deadlines.
  • Mentoring orientation: guiding junior developers, promoting knowledge sharing and elevating team practices.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning mindset to stay current with evolving full‑stack technologies and industry trends.
  • Business‑oriented thinking: understanding how technical solutions tie to user experience, performance metrics, and business outcomes.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology or a related field.
Preferred Education:
Master’s degree or equivalent professional credentials, full‑stack development certifications or accelerated digital credentials.
Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software or Systems Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Web and Application Development

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:
3‑5 years of hands‑on full‑stack software development across front‑end and back‑end environments.
Preferred:
5+ years of full‑stack development experience including end‑to‑end project ownership, architecture design, mentoring or leading small teams and delivering production‑scale systems.