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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Functional Developer

💰 $120,000 - $190,000

Software DevelopmentEngineeringFunctional ProgrammingBackend Development

🎯 Role Definition

This role requires a highly skilled and passionate Functional Developer to join our innovative engineering team. In this role, you will be instrumental in designing, building, and maintaining high-performance, fault-tolerant backend services and data processing systems. You will apply functional programming principles to solve complex problems, creating code that is not only correct and efficient but also elegant, composable, and easy to reason about. The ideal candidate is a proactive problem-solver with a deep appreciation for type-driven design, immutability, and the mathematical foundations of software development. You will be a key contributor to our core platforms, influencing our architecture and championing best practices in functional programming across the organization.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Software Engineer (with experience or strong interest in Java, C#, or Python)
  • Backend Developer
  • Data Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior/Principal Functional Developer
  • Software Architect (specializing in Distributed Systems)
  • Tech Lead / Engineering Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Data Engineer (specializing in streaming platforms)
  • Distributed Systems Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, develop, and maintain high-performance, fault-tolerant backend services and APIs using statically-typed functional programming languages like Scala, Haskell, or F#.
  • Leverage functional programming principles, including immutability, pure functions, and higher-order functions, to write clean, predictable, and easily testable code.
  • Architect and implement robust, large-scale data processing pipelines and streaming applications using technologies such as Akka Streams, Kafka, Flink, or Spark.
  • Engage in the full software development lifecycle (SDLC), from conceptualization and requirements gathering through to deployment, monitoring, and ongoing maintenance in a fast-paced, agile environment.
  • Write comprehensive unit, integration, and property-based tests (e.g., using ScalaCheck, Hedgehog) to ensure code quality, correctness, and system reliability under various conditions.
  • Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams, including product managers, data scientists, and other engineers, to define, design, and ship new features and platform capabilities.
  • Champion best practices in functional programming, type-driven design, and system architecture within the engineering organization through rigorous code reviews, pair programming, and mentorship.
  • Optimize application performance by identifying and resolving complex bottlenecks related to computation, I/O, concurrency, and memory management.
  • Model complex business domains using the expressive power of algebraic data types (ADTs) and advanced type systems to ensure correctness and clarity by design.
  • Manage and evolve application infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Pulumi in a cloud-native environment (AWS, GCP, Azure).
  • Integrate with various data stores, including relational (PostgreSQL), NoSQL (Cassandra, DynamoDB), and in-memory databases, ensuring data consistency and integrity.
  • Troubleshoot and debug complex issues in highly distributed and concurrent systems, utilizing advanced logging, monitoring, and tracing tools to rapidly identify root causes.
  • Participate actively in an agile development process, contributing to sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives to ensure timely and predictable delivery of product increments.
  • Refactor and modernize legacy codebases, strategically introducing functional programming concepts to improve maintainability, testability, and reduce technical debt.
  • Contribute to the evolution and automation of our continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to streamline build, testing, and release processes.
  • Author and maintain thorough technical documentation for APIs, system architecture, and operational procedures to facilitate knowledge sharing and team onboarding.
  • Stay abreast of the latest advancements and trends in the functional programming ecosystem and advocate for the adoption of new libraries, tools, and techniques where appropriate.
  • Ensure the security of our systems by implementing secure coding practices, participating in security reviews, and addressing vulnerabilities.
  • Build and support highly observable systems by implementing robust logging, metrics (e.g., Prometheus), and distributed tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry) to monitor system health.
  • Model and manage asynchronous and concurrent workflows effectively using appropriate libraries and abstractions, such as Cats Effect, ZIO, or Akka Actors.
  • Develop and maintain clean, well-structured, and reusable code libraries and components that can be shared across the engineering organization.

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)

  • Deep proficiency in at least one statically-typed functional programming language such as Scala, Haskell, F#, or OCaml.
  • Strong, practical understanding of functional programming concepts: immutability, pure functions, referential transparency, higher-order functions, and type-driven design.
  • Hands-on experience with core functional libraries and frameworks (e.g., Cats Effect, ZIO, Akka, http4s for Scala; Monad transformers, Lenses for Haskell).
  • Proven experience building, deploying, and operating distributed systems and microservices architecture in a production environment.
  • Expertise in concurrent and asynchronous programming models (e.g., Actors, Effect Systems (IO Monad), Software Transactional Memory (STM)).
  • Strong knowledge of containerization (Docker) and orchestration technologies (Kubernetes).
  • Proficiency with CI/CD principles and tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions).
  • Solid understanding of database technologies, both SQL (e.g., PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (e.g., Cassandra, DynamoDB, Redis).
  • Experience with public cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure and their essential services (e.g., S3, EC2, Lambda, SQS).
  • Familiarity with event-driven architecture and streaming data technologies like Apache Kafka, Kinesis, or Pulsar.
  • Experience with modern build tools such as sbt, Gradle, Mill, or Cabal.
  • Knowledge of property-based testing frameworks like ScalaCheck or Hedgehog.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with a methodical approach to debugging complex systems.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical ideas to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • A proactive, curious, and self-motivated mindset with a genuine passion for learning and continuous professional growth.
  • Strong collaboration skills and the ability to work effectively as part of a high-performing, agile team.
  • A deep sense of ownership and accountability for the quality and reliability of the software you build and maintain.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree or PhD in a relevant field, particularly with a focus on Programming Language Theory, Type Systems, or Distributed Computing.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Mathematics
  • Physics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3-7+ years of professional software development experience, with a significant portion dedicated to functional programming.

Preferred:

  • A demonstrable track record of shipping and maintaining production systems built with a functional-first approach. A public portfolio of projects on GitHub or contributions to open-source functional programming libraries is a strong plus.
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