Main Responsibilities and Required Skills for a Backend Software Engineer
A Backend Software Engineer is a professional who specializes in developing and maintaining the server-side components of software applications. They are responsible for building the logic and functionality that powers the backend of a system, ensuring its efficiency, reliability, and scalability. In this blog post, we will describe the primary responsibilities and the most in-demand hard and soft skills for Backend Software Engineers.
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Main Responsibilities of a Backend Software Engineer
The following list describes the typical responsibilities of a Backend Software Engineer:
Achieve
Achieve on-time delivery without compromising quality.
Achieve team success through care and respect.
Analyze
Analyze market trends and review competition.
Architect
Architect, build, and maintain critical path, high traffic services across multiple data regions.
Assist in
Assist and collaborate with other engineers on the team to meet team goals.
Assist in driving the profitability of the branch, creating a solid pipeline of monthly instructions.
Author
Author, review and approve functional and non-functional requirements.
Build
Build and maintain a HIPAA compliant infrastructure.
Build and maintain our set of microservices, many of them with serverless implementations.
Build and optimise processes to support the development and global scalability of our products.
Build and sustain automation and testing tooling.
Build comprehensive technical solutions with high quality standards and a clean coding style.
Build high performance, scalable services.
Build innovative consumer experiences, setting standards for code and performance.
Build internal infrastructure and tooling as needed to support product features.
Build, maintain and scale RESTful microservices.
Build new features using NodeJS, Express.js and serverless cloud technologies.
Build robust, self-monitoring systems to analyze real estate property all over the world.
Build strong development skills.
Build, test, and ship end-to-end features to our growing base of customers at a rapid cadence.
Champion
Champion, promote, and deploy the effective use of leading-edge application monitoring.
Clean
Clean Tech Company of the Year - New England Venture Capital Association.
Collaborate with
Collaborate successfully with developers, architects, UX Designers, and Product Managers.
Collaborate with a diverse group of people, giving and receiving feedback for growth.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product managers and quality assurance engineers, to deliver high-quality software solutions.
Collaborate with DevOps teams to deploy and manage backend systems in production environments.
Collaborate with feature development teams to understand their needs from the platform.
Collaborate with frontend developers to integrate frontend and backend components seamlessly.
Collaborate with frontend teams to optimize frontend-backend communication and data transfer.
Collaborate with stakeholders to gather and analyze requirements for backend system enhancements or new features.
Collaborate with team to build upon and improve service architecture.
Collaborate with the team to build upon and improve the microservices architecture.
Communicate
Communicate effectively with their colleagues in English.
Communicate excellently to both technical and non-technical people.
Conduct
Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to team members.
Conduct load testing and performance tuning to optimize backend systems for high traffic scenarios.
Conduct performance testing and optimization to ensure efficient resource utilization.
Contribute to
Contribute and influence the product roadmap.
Contribute to core APIs and overall system design.
Contribute to design discussions in a highly-scalable microservice environment, implemented on AWS.
Contribute to product direction in design discussions.
Coordinate
Coordinate with team members who work on different layers of infrastructure.
Create
Create and maintain APIs to enable communication between frontend and backend components.
Create and maintain scalable RESTful APIs.
Cultivate
Cultivate credible, reliable, and authentic interpersonal relationships.
Customize
Customize and extend enterprise tools and platforms.
Debug
Debug and troubleshoot issues in the backend systems, providing timely resolutions.
Debug applications on full scale from Front End to Back End when required.
Decide
Decide how to best build core systems to take advantage of our microservices architecture.
Define
Define an architecture for fault-tolerant, distributed, and adaptive automation applications.
Define / establish best practices within CureMatch and Development Team, including coding standards.
Design
Design and architect features from the ground up for a rapidly growing business.
Design and build distributed systems for long-term scalability and maintainability.
Design and develop our growing suite of software, written in Python 3.
Design and implement automated, scalable, and robust tools.
Design and implement cross team micro services for common functionality.
Design and implement database schemas, ensuring data integrity and optimizing query performance.
Design and implement the future of our secure core messaging platform.
Develop
Develop analytics capabilities to understand customer insights.
Develop and maintain unit tests and automated testing frameworks for backend components.
Develop distributed performance monitoring tools.
Develop new backend features to support the delivery of Voice experiences within Peloton's products.
Develop scalable and efficient backend systems using appropriate programming languages and frameworks.
Develop software systems for a fast-growing, disruptive Big Data & IoT company.
Drive
Drive reliability across our systems.
Engage
Engage directly with cloud providers to understand better their use cases and problems to tackle.
Engage with customers and support when required to solve production issues.
Engage with our community of users to grow the understanding and adoption of the StreamSets platform.
Enjoy
Enjoy tinkering with tools and programs to optimise their usage.
Ensure
Ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations in the backend development process.
Ensure legislative compliance and demonstrate strong industry knowledge.
Evaluate
Evaluate toolchains, development environments, and third-party services.
Execute
Execute on big opportunities, helping Hopper rise to the top of the travel industry.
Facilitate
Facilitate monitoring and custom instrumentation across our business-critical applications.
Follow
Follow engineering standards and practices to deliver well-tested and well-architected code.
Help
Help debug production issues across services.
Help manage the proprietary trading accounts.
Identify
Identify and implement process improvements to enhance the user experience.
Implement
Implement and integrate application and data security mechanisms.
Implement caching strategies to enhance application performance and reduce database load.
Implement data migration and transformation processes when required.
Implement key product features yourself.
Implement security measures to protect the backend systems from potential vulnerabilities.
Implement version control and utilize code management tools, such as Git, for efficient code collaboration.
Improve
Improve and maintain applications after deployment whilst also prototyping for the future.
Improve engineering standards and development tooling.
Improve multi-tenancy & scalability.
Incubate
Incubate successful prototypes to through production scale.
Inspect
Inspect and analyze various network protocols deployed in automation systems.
Integrate
Integrate open source, commercial, and in-house implemented analytics tools with our Data Platform.
Integrate third-party services and systems, such as payment gateways or external APIs, into the backend.
Interface with
Interface with multiple 3rd party services and APIs.
Investigate
Investigate and prototype new technologies and applications.
Investigate and raise cards to support new features.
Investigate and resolve 15 - 20 reported bugs.
Lead
Lead application software development projects implemented by yourself or small teams.
Lead application software development projects including with small teams.
Lead client-facing projects in small teams.
Lead development and adoption of good process & testing.
Lead technical design discussions and drive technical decisions.
Learn
Learn, maintain, and make improvements or changes to a legacy code base.
Liaise with
Liaise with developers, designers and system administrators to identify new features.
Love
Love to develop systems that are highly reliable, scalable, but easy to maintain.
Love writing code and using top notch technologies and frameworks?.
Maintain
Maintain a comprehensive register, generating and winning market appraisals and instructions.
Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review within the data and engineering teams.
Maintain relentless focus on our high uptime requirements and operational excellence.
Make
Make updates to a SQL server database schema using our in-house data modeling tool, X2O.
Manage
Manage individual project deliverables and mentor junior team members.
Meet
Meet some of the Britelings that make it happen.
Mentor
Mentor and guide engineers on best practices.
Mentor and guide other engineers using your awesome knowledge and experience.
Mentor other engineers in building their technical skills.
Monitor
Monitor and analyze application performance metrics to identify areas of improvement.
Monitor application logs and implement appropriate logging and error handling mechanisms.
Optimize
Optimize application performance and ensure scalability to handle increased user loads.
Own
Own and drive development and delivery of features in the API.
Own features all the way from initial development to the production release and beyond.
Own your work and ensure you deliver from start to finish.
Participate in
Participate in agile development methodologies, such as Scrum or Kanban, for efficient project delivery.
Participate in all phases of the software development cycle as part of a Scrum team.
Participate in change initiatives by levelling up your and your team's skillsets.
Participate in code reviews.
Participate in code reviews to ensure code quality and distribute knowledge.
Participate in pair programming and peer reviews.
Participate in resolution of production issues and lead efforts toward solutions.
Participate in the team's on-call rotation, triaging and addressing production issues as they arise.
Perform
Perform code refactoring and optimization to improve code quality and maintainability.
Perform other tasks as required.
Perform regression testing and write unit tests.
Perform scheduled code, database schema, and data migrations to various environments.
Perform user discovery, workflow design, and UI / UX development.
Produce
Produce accurate, clear technical design specifications to the appropriate level of detail.
Prospect
Prospect for and engage with with potential clientele and agencies.
Prototype
Prototype and build new functionality to deliver on key product objectives.
Provide
Provide hands on technical leadership and participate in architectural decision-making.
Provide input on how to make the products more usable.
Provide technical guidance and support to junior developers or team members when needed.
Provide technical guidance to software engineering team.
Provide technical leadership and mentoring to engineers within the team.
Receive
Receive similar job offers.
Research
Research and evaluate new technologies and frameworks to improve backend development processes.
Research new tools, technologies, and test processes for software developments.
Respond to
Respond to and handle manufacturing process change requests promptly.
Respond to issues discovered in a dynamic and static scan of existing code bases.
Review
Review and guide the development of Restful APIs to query terabytes of data.
Review your peers and ensure no bug slips to production.
Shape
Shape and implement new product features, as well as migrate and update legacy systems.
Ship
Ship your first code in days, iterating on features in an agile manner.
Solve
Solve engineering problems and improve engineering efficiency through automation and tooling.
Stay updated with
Stay updated with the latest trends and advancements in backend development technologies and frameworks.
Support
Support critical production systems as part of our on-call rotation.
Support existing production code and improve performance and customer experience.
Support tools for our farms' environmental sensing systems' development and maintenance.
Support tools including web apps for our environmental sensing & data systems.
Take
Take an active part in our Agile process.
Take ownership of key products and features—from software design to project planning and deployment.
Take ownership of technical direction, design, and architecture for new features within our platform.
Take ownership of the quality and usability of your code.
Take part in product definition by working on clear specifications and implementation tasks.
Track
Track record in large-scale customer facing system software or SaaS services development.
Unblock
Unblock, support and effectively communicate across teams to achieve results.
Understand
Understand performance and scaling issues and how code choices determine these.
Understand that uniqueness creates innovation and greatness.
Understand the importance of best practices and pragmatism.
Use
Use code quality tools like linters, type checkers and static analysers.
Utilize
Utilize state-of-the-art technologies to build modular and maintainable features and products.
Work with
Work directly with the product team to gather feature requirements and implement new functionality.
Work on topics related to cloud qualities including performance, scalability, and accessibility.
Work through the software development agile process and its best practices.
Work with 3rd party services to ensure stability, quality of service and new feature roadmap.
Work with and influence a number of stakeholders towards satisfying the customer needs.
Work with a project manager to estimate project completion.
Work with a small team of experienced entrepreneurs creating revolutionary technology.
Work with cutting edge technologies.
Work with large data sets and expertly design efficient algorithms, queries, and caching methods.
Work with Product, other engineers and colleagues on approaches to solving our customers problems.
Write
Write a custom SQL query to investigate a data issue or inquiry from the client.
Write and maintain technical documentation, including system architecture and API specifications.
Write clean, maintainable code and documentation using engineering best practices.
Write clean, modular, and maintainable code following coding best practices and standards.
Write efficient modules that drive complex web applications.
Write well-crafted, well-tested, readable, maintainable code.
Write well documented, semantic, and clean code is a must.
Most In-demand Hard Skills
The following list describes the most required technical skills of a Backend Software Engineer:
Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages, such as Java, Python, or Ruby.
Experience with web application frameworks, such as Spring Boot, Django, or Ruby on Rails.
Knowledge of database systems, including relational databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, Redis).
Understanding of RESTful API design principles and experience in building and consuming APIs.
Familiarity with version control systems, such as Git, for source code management.
Experience with cloud computing platforms, such as AWS or Azure, for deploying and managing backend systems.
Understanding of server-side development principles and design patterns.
Proficiency in working with Linux/Unix environments and shell scripting.
Knowledge of message queue systems, such as RabbitMQ or Apache Kafka, for building scalable and distributed systems.
Familiarity with containerization technologies, such as Docker or Kubernetes, for deployment and scalability.
Understanding of caching mechanisms and tools, such as Redis or Memcached, for performance optimization.
Proficiency in working with API documentation tools, like Swagger or Postman, for API development and testing.
Experience with testing frameworks and methodologies, such as JUnit or TestNG, for automated testing.
Knowledge of web security principles and best practices, including authentication and authorization mechanisms.
Understanding of software architecture patterns, such as MVC or microservices.
Proficiency in working with data serialization formats, such as JSON or XML.
Experience with message-oriented middleware, such as Apache ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ.
Knowledge of performance monitoring and profiling tools to identify and optimize system bottlenecks.
Understanding of networking concepts and protocols, including TCP/IP and HTTP.
Proficiency in working with command-line tools and utilities for backend development and system administration.
Most In-demand Soft Skills
The following list describes the most required soft skills of a Backend Software Engineer:
Strong problem-solving and analytical skills to tackle complex technical challenges.
Effective communication and collaboration skills to work in a team-oriented environment.
Attention to detail and commitment to writing clean, maintainable code.
Adaptability and willingness to learn new technologies and frameworks.
Time management and organizational skills to handle multiple tasks and meet project deadlines.
Continual learning mindset to stay updated with the latest trends and advancements in backend development.
Strong debugging and troubleshooting abilities to diagnose and resolve issues efficiently.
Ability to work independently and take ownership of assigned tasks and projects.
Excellent documentation skills to effectively communicate technical concepts and solutions.
Problem-solving and critical-thinking skills to architect scalable and efficient backend systems.
Conclusion
A Backend Software Engineer plays a critical role in building the server-side components of software applications. They possess a combination of technical skills, including proficiency in programming languages, databases, APIs, and frameworks, as well as essential soft skills such as problem-solving, communication, and adaptability. By fulfilling their main responsibilities and leveraging these skills, Backend Software Engineers contribute significantly to the development of robust, scalable, and efficient software solutions.
