Software Architecture

Job Description

This job description template is tailored for a Software Development Engineer (SDE). Customize the responsibilities, stack, and competencies to match your product domain and team practices.

Role Overview

• The Software Development Engineer designs, builds, and maintains high-quality software that delivers measurable business impact. This role blends deep coding expertise with product thinking and operational ownership: delivering features end-to-end, improving performance and reliability, and collaborating across product, design, and platform teams.
• Ideal for product teams seeking strong ownership, pragmatic engineering, and a bias for automation and continuous improvement.
  Key Responsibilities
• Design and implement features with clean, maintainable code; write unit, integration, and end-to-end tests aligned to a testing pyramid.
  Collaborate with product and design to refine requirements, define acceptance criteria, and plan iterative delivery with clear milestones.
  Build reliable APIs/services and data models; ensure backward compatibility and clear contracts for consumers.
  Instrument code with logs, metrics, and traces; define SLOs/SLIs; triage and resolve production issues with blameless root-cause analysis.
  Automate workflows (CI/CD pipelines, code quality checks, security scans) and champion continuous delivery practices including canary/blue-green strategies where applicable.
  Maintain high standards for code reviews, documentation, and technical debt management; plan refactors that improve reliability and developer productivity.
  Partner with platform/SRE/security to embed security and compliance by design (secrets management, least privilege, dependency hygiene).

Minimum Qualifications

• Professional experience building production software in one or more languages (e.g., Java/Kotlin, Go, Python, TypeScript).
• Solid grasp of computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and distributed systems basics.
• Experience designing REST/gRPC APIs, working with relational and/or NoSQL databases, and using version control (Git) with modern branching strategies.
• Hands-on with automated testing and CI; understands build pipelines and artifact management.

Preferred Qualifications

• Cloud-native development on AWS/GCP/Azure; familiarity with containers (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Pulumi) and deployment strategies (canary, blue/green, feature flags).
• Observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and performance tuning for latency/throughput/cost.
• Security-first mindset: SAST/DAST/SCA integration, secrets management, and least-privilege IAM design.

Core Competencies

Ownership: drives features from concept to production and long-term maintenance; proactively manages risks and trade-offs.
Systems thinking: designs with scalability, reliability, and cost in mind; defines clear boundaries and contracts.
Collaboration: communicates clearly with cross-functional partners; gives and receives actionable feedback in code reviews.
Sample Day-in-the-Life

Tooling Examples

• Languages/Frameworks: Java/Kotlin (Spring), Go, Python (FastAPI), TypeScript (Node.js, NestJS/Express), React.
• Data: PostgreSQL/MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, message queues/streams (Kafka, Pub/Sub).
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins; artifact registries; Argo CD/Flux for GitOps.