A software development engineer is an expert in the creation, implementation, and maintenance of software. They are in charge of designing, implementing, and maintaining new software systems. In this blog post we describe the primary responsibilities and the most in-demand hard and soft skills for Software Development Engineers.

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Main Responsibilities of Software Development Engineer

The following list describes the typical responsibilities of a Software Development Engineer:

Advise

• Advise managers tech leads.

• Advise SDMs, product managers and senior engineering leadership.

• Advise to other teams on how they can refine their test approaches (including developers).

Analyse

• Analyse and assess impacts of our API's & features on Workday's flagship products.

• Analyze and create cutting edge solutions for Core Payments teams.

• Analyze and create cutting edge solutions for switching solutions teams.

Assist with / Assist in

• Assist directly and indirectly in the continual hiring and mentoring of other SDEs.

• Assist in planning and documenting test strategies and acceptance criteria based on customer needs.

• Assist in recommending and facilitating future maintenance and enhancements.

• Assist in technical audits and make sure to implement audit recommendations.

• Assist with data collection efforts, in particular data extraction, transfer and de-identification.

• Assist with mentoring less experienced engineers.

• Assist with product integration of AI solutions.

• Assist with production support issues by acting as a subject matter expert in resolving.

• Assist with reporting and tracking of AI results.

• Assist with selection of technical resources for projects.

Attend

Attend daily stand-ups and communicate progress and status to team and QA.

Author

• Author and support an automated testing suite for our web application.

• Author feature-specific design documents.

Automate

Automate and simplify team development, test, deployment, and operations processes.

Build

• Build a combination of heuristics and machine learned models to solve for Ad relevance.

• Build a culture of trust, ownership and purpose.

• Build and deployment pipelines.

• Build and maintain full-stack applications & services.

• Build and maintain highly effective configuration management system.

• Build and maintain performance testing frameworks that can scale up.

• Build automated tests using modern client and server-side frameworks & tools.

• Build data visualization tools to analyze data flow and system performance.

• Build features and applications with a mobile responsive design.

• Build, grow, and lead a technical team of Software Development, QA, and DevOps Engineers.

• Build highly available, secure, distributed systems in a microservices architecture.

• Build highly available, secure, systems in a microservices architecture.

• Build iteratively using agile methodologies.

• Build performant, scalable and secure web applications.

• Build Team owns the tools that allow developers across Amazon to build quickly and correctly.

• Build technical architecture between multiple complex systems.

• Build technical specifications, prototypes and presentations to communicate your ideas.

• Build test automation for all aspects of the product within the development team.

• Build test scenarios and acceptance tests for the stories in the Product backlog.

• Build the next generation of our solutions.

• Build the team of QA engineers and SDETs.

• Build tools to help Marketers handle and create appealing content.

• Build various data pipelines and APIs to support different features and products.

Champion

Champion testing practices within teams and help shape their testing strategy.

Code

Code and test complex system modules.

Collaborates with

• Collaborates with Stakeholders.

• Collaborate with customers through full engagements.

• Collaborate with developers in reviewing unit tests and integration results for coverage analysis.

• Collaborate with external teams across countries and time zones.

• Collaborate with other departments to assist in the vision for future projects.

• Collaborate with other Developer Tools teams to provide a smooth developer experience.

• Collaborate with other engineers in system design, architectural and code reviews.

• Collaborate with other team members and stakeholders.

• Collaborate with research scientists to deliver production ready features and products.

• Collaborate with some of the leading minds in distributed systems and Big Data.

• Collaborate with teams and exceptional peers who are passionate about what they do.

• Collaborate with upstream / downstream teams.

• Collaborate with UX designers, QA and Product Owners to define, size and implement user stories.

Communicate

• Communicate need for operational resiliency.

• Communicate plans and status.

• Communicate project status and issues to the Program Core Team as appropriate.

• Communicate successfully all concepts and guidelines to development team.

Complete

Complete operational quality gating (OSA Health).

Conduct

• Conduct job training and provide assistance to junior test engineers as needed.

• Conduct product and application testing / simulation.

Contribute to

• Contribute ideas for continually improving the team's productivity, job enjoyment and code quality.

• Contribute ideas to improve the processes and best practices based on the experience.

• Contribute to building a flexible and scalable automation solution.

• Contribute to engineering efforts for validating major / minor upgrades of the data platform.

• Contribute to gathering technical requirements and architectural decision making.

• Contribute to the maintenance a defect tracking process.

• Contribute to the technical content of the compiler documentation / manuals.

Create

• Create alternative technical solutions through PLCs.

• Create and maintain scalable and robust Test Automation Frameworks.

• Create and manage defect reports and communicate with the team.

• Create documentation such as high level design and detailed design.

• Create, maintain and enhance Test automation coverage and effectiveness.

• Create or introduce, test, and deploy new technology to optimize the service.

• Create POCs where necessary to validate fit for purpose.

• Create proof of concept applications.

• Create release notes and documentation.

• Create security and data protection settings.

Debug

• Debug failed test cases and report bugs with details.

• Debug system level deployment issues, root cause analysis, and resolve failures.

Define

• Define and deliver large multi-tiered distributed software applications.

• Define, design, and implement multi-tier distributed software applications.

• Define functional and performance test criteria for the design.

• Define product internal / external interfaces.

• Define the corresponding vision, roadmap, and execution plan for their immediate team.

Deliver

Deliver high quality solutions in a hyper-growth environment where priorities shift.

Deploys

Deploy hardware and software components.

Design

• Design and develop front-end UI using JavaScript / Typescript.

• Design and develop high-throughput low latency systems for Alexa scale.

• Design and develop overall automated QA strategy and architecture for Augmented Analytics platform.

• Design and develop software that compels people to engage with media.

• Design and develop support for new features in Direct3D / Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL.

• Design and document solutions that are long term and scalable worldwide.

• Design and execute tests for ETL processes.

• Design and implement APIs and SDKs to be used by third-party application developers.

• Design and implement device driver and firmware for AMD APU products.

• Design and implement robust, scalable, and high quality software components.

• Design and implement software lifecycle and quality assurance methods.

• Design and implement tools that effectively solve issues for partner teams.

• Design and implement web UI frontend code for upcoming features.

• Design components and APIs for cross functional application teams.

• Design develop and debug graphics driver for both Windows and Linux Guest OS.

• Design & Develop batch and streaming solutions using various Big Data technologies.

• Design & develop REST APIs and webservices using Java, Spring Boot and other emerging technologies.

• Design highly complex applications, interfaces, and integrations.

• Design new software and firmware architecture.

• Design scalable, distributed systems on modern frameworks.

Develop

• Develop and deploy new technologies on a cutting-edge network.

• Develop and executes test plans for a single application.

• Develop and maintain software applications to a high standard.

• Develop applications using Java / J2EE technologies.

• Develop automated tests using Selenium with web driver.

• Develop automation to expand coverage and prevent regressions.

• Develop comprehensively assessed, achievable release objectives with your team.

• Develop design documentation and lead reviews with other engineers.

• Develop enhancements to existing routing, discovery and security API framework.

• Develop junior and new team members by mentoring them on multiple fronts.

• Develop key features for on new hardware product initiatives.

• Develop maintainable automation following team standards in C#, using nUnit and Selenium.

• Develop mobile SDK's & applications, including demo applications, making use of our technology.

• Develop on both legacy and Engage hardware platforms.

• Develop reports and data models using various BI tools.

• Develop technologies to solve complex data problems.

• Develop tools and automation to ease the setup and maintenance of services.

Document

• Document and automate the testing of multiple websites, back office finance systems and web services.

• Document the API and solutions.

Drive

• Drive and support innovation.

• Drive and work on algorithm and architecture design, execute and deliver results.

• Drive culture of continuous improvement on the team.

• Drive innovative improvements to team development processes.

• Drive the quality agenda (develop test plans & test cases, write automated tests) for new features.

• Drive the requirement definition and working together with our customers.

• Drive the system architecture.

• Drive the team's continual improvement, providing expert guidance on Agile best practices.

Emphasize

Emphasize clean, re-usable design and code built for test automation.

Engage

Engage with architecture team to clearly understand the system design and roadmap.

Ensure

• Ensure adequate test coverage System Testing / Integration and Regression Testing.

• Ensure adherence to established software development process.

• Ensure a high-quality code base by writing and reviewing performant, well-tested code.

• Ensure an incident report is created for each P1 or P2 incident when caused by the platform.

• Ensure code is easily maintainable and tracked in version control system.

• Ensure compliance to the defined standards.

• Ensure Multiple Levels of Service Monitoring Result in Continual Improvements.

• Ensure own team's compliance to objective / goal setting and performance appraisal process.

• Ensure Performance and Scalability for applications and platforms.

• Ensure projects are planned, estimated, scheduled and delivered on-time with high quality.

• Ensure that products meet all FDA and international requirements for medical products.

• Ensure that staff are adequately trained and career development plans are in place.

• Ensure that support is provided for the team's area of technical ownership in Production.

• Ensure the accuracy of the Mastercard SIA (System Impact Analysis) Questionnaire for the service.

• Ensure the project or effort is adequately staffed.

• Ensure the quality of architecture and design of systems.

• Ensure the technical feasibility of UX design.

Establish

• Establish architectural principles, select design patterns and then mentor team members.

• Establish coding standards for enterprise web and mobile based application solutions.

• Establish technical requirements for Digital Identity programs.

Evaluate

Evaluate test cases continuously for inclusion in automation.

Execute

• Execute and own the baseline architecture and design activities collaborating with Engineering Team.

• Execute projects from scoping requirements through launch.

• Execute test cases, analyze and report test results to product teams.

• Execute test cases (manual or automated) and analyze results.

Facilitate

Facilitate the resolution and necessary follow up.

Focus on

• Focus on details of software development, design, implementation and debugging.

• Focus on quality, deadlines and deliverables.

Generate

• Generate effective test status and defect / progress reports.

• Generate metrics and alarms from their log events.

Guide

• Guide and enable team members on new tools and processes.

• Guide junior SDEs in- and outside the team.

Handle

• Handle multiple projects at one time and be very results oriented.

• Handle the design, architecture, development, code review, and testing of applications.

Help

• Help deliver a delightful product to our customers, iterate on it, rinse and repeat.

• Help drive best practices and processes across the team.

• Help increase software reliability and accountability.

Identify

• Identify opportunities for different or new technologies techniques and evaluate which are best.

• Identify potential problems, omissions and open issues, attend walkthroughs and signoff meetings.

Implement

• Implement and maintain our services for the SaaS product.

• Implement custom native and React Native user interfaces using the latest or programming techniques.

• Implement new features according to the new feature specifications.

• Implement OpenGL / ES new features / extensions for new generation AMD GPU.

• Implement substantial software features.

Improve

• Improve customer satisfaction and product quality by solving technical problems.

• Improve deployment processes to reduce the chance of downtime and critical bugs.

• Improve the interfaces and integrations with related teams.

Increase

Increase automated test coverage to support and streamline the testing effort.

Influence

• Influence feature design with a strong focus on testability among the development team.

• Influence system architecture to drive code health, Testability & Maintainability.

• Influence the decisions made by the team.

Lead

• Lead and manage a team of Production Engineers.

• Lead Quality Assurance and Quality Control processes in the department.

• Lead integration / test efforts of complex systems.

• Lead Software Development Engineer- Technical lead.

• Lead the design, implementation, and delivery for engineering efforts across a program.

• Lead the enablement of differentiated solutions / features on our customer design wins.

Maintain

• Maintain and improve Continuous Integration tests of AMD Graphic Drivers.

• Maintain and refine OpenGL / ES driver architecture.

• Maintain code integrity and organization.

• Maintain upstream projects related to Amazon EKS, Kubernetes, and Etcd.

Make

• Make data workflows more efficient and automate them when possible.

• Make informed decisions quickly and taking ownership of services and applications at scale.

• Make modifications to automation framework if necessary.

Manage

• Manage existing automation script akin to how engineers manage code.

• Manage global load-balancing, routing and where applicable rate limiting for application traffic.

• Manage individual and team project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables.

• Manage relationship with various stakeholders - Business Owners, Testing Teams etc..

Mentor

• Mentor and coach team members, fostering alignment in strategy and values.

• Mentor and grow Junior developers.

• Mentor and grow junior team members.

• Mentor and learn from other team members through pairing, code reviews, and Hackathons, etc..

• Mentor and provide guidance to other team members.

• Mentor junior developers and help drive engineering maturity (2+ years).

• Mentor junior engineers and teammates.

• Mentor junior Software Engineers.

• Mentor other junior engineers in the team.

• Mentor other QA testers on GUI automation.

• Mentor the senior & junior engineers on your team through sound technical.

Optimize

• Optimize applications for speed, scalability & reuse.

• Optimize deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc. for AMD GPUs.

Oversee

• Oversee effective development and delivery of software solutions.

• Oversee / mentor and provide technical support to junior team members.

• Oversee and provide technical support to junior team members.

Own

• Own and operate the systems that you build.

• Own the architecture and design of software solutions including.

• Own the end to end delivery of key features and be responsible for the quality of the code.

Participate in

• Participate in all the scrum ceremonies.

• Participate in architecture, design and code reviews to maintain our high development standards.

• Participate in a team culture that values open communication and strong commitment to code quality.

• Participate in design and architecture of overall product and own the same for your features.

• Participate in design and code inspections.

• Participate in design discussions.

• Participate in requirements gathering, UML or Use Case modeling, analysis, and design activities.

• Participate in team prioritization discussions with Product / Business stakeholders.

• Participate in the evolution of standard methodologies.

• Participate in the full development life-cycle, including design, development, and implementation.

Perform

• Perform additional duties as assigned.

• Perform code analysis and look for ways to improve test coverage.

• Perform experimental and regression testing to investigate the root cause of the defect.

• Perform high-level and detailed feature estimations.

• Perform manual acceptance testing when appropriate.

• Perform & participate in code reviews, retrospectives, and review Pull Requests using Git.

Promote

• Promote good software engineering practices.

• Promote good software testing practices at every stage of development.

Provide

• Provide feedback on peer design and code includes optimization and simplification recommendations.

• Provide highly effective code reviews and peer support.

• Provide input into performance appraisal process for some junior employees or team members.

• Provide inputs in developing estimates to support new and existing projects.

• Provide input to the team manager on staffing decisions.

• Provide on-call production support for payment platform applications.

• Provide ongoing maintenance, support and enhancements in existing systems and platforms.

• Provide performance metrics and maintain dashboards to reflect production systems health.

• Provide suggestions for feature and fixes in released and unreleased products.

• Provide technical guidance to junior team members and resolve day-to-day issues.

• Provide technical leadership and direction to software development teams.

• Provide technical support and consultation to internal and external customers.

• Provide technical thought leadership.

• Provide training and mentoring to other team members on areas of expertise.

• Provide unit and system tests to validate those solutions.

Report

• Report thorough bug reports and enhancements in ALM.

• Report to our Engineering Manager of internal tools.

Research

• Research, analyze and delivering solutions for the business and technology strategies.

• Research, evaluate, and prototype solution alternatives for given business needs.

• Research, prototyping, innovation and technical excellence are essential parts of our team culture.

Resolve

Resolve impending issues before customers notice them.

Review

• Review and monitor current state of the industry, ongoing research, and new technologies.

• Review and monitor test results.

• Review and scanning tools and configuration, branching techniques.

• Review appropriate quality plans, test strategies and interact with QA for testing activities.

• Review Code and provide feedback to other SDITs in the team.

• Review each other's work and hold team members accountable for high code quality standards.

• Review project progress and evaluates results.

• Review project test and implementation schedules.

• Review stories for the above 'ilities' and adds acceptance criteria and / or tasks to address.

• Review user manuals for accuracy.

Select

Select and develop appropriate QA automation tools to support our environment.

Solve

• Solve complex, novel, and non-recurring problems and improve existing processes / methods.

• Solve complex production engineering problems in code.

Support

• Support cloud gaming and cloud computing for the world first-class internet giants.

• Support distributed development and test teams.

• Support escalated production issues.

• Support field issue resolution by driving root-cause analysis and assessing bug-fix options.

• Support production 24 / 7 environment as part of a global team.

• Support requirements team lead in negotiating interfaces and requirements.

• Support with Tooling and Process Automation.

Take

• Take a product initiative from requirements to production.

• Take project management responsibility for project releases to support our product roadmap.

• Test and deliver features on time and without any regression or production issues.

• Test cases based upon functional and design specifications.

Track

• Track record of delivering software successfully to customers.

• Track expected pipeline and assesses platform ability to support the capacity.

• Track testing progress and defects via Rally.

Translate

• Translate complex system requirements and specs into test requirements and testing methods.

• Translate contract requirements into work requirements, processes and tasks.

• Translate UX designs into high quality components that are modular, functional and testable.

Triage

• Triage and debug of production issues.

• Triage and ownership of incidents related to the SDN.

Understand

• Understand and present technical status updates to upper managers, peers, and engineer teams.

• Understand and use Design Patterns to deliver scalable and always available solutions.

• Understand how to test concurrency, arrival rates, and scheduling.

• Understand basic business processes and organizational structure.

• Understand system inter-dependencies and limitations.

Use

• Use consistent measurements and metrics.

• Use of machine-learning techniques where applicable to address data analysis needs.

• Use software engineering best practices to ensure a high standard of quality.

• Use that knowledge to determine testing priorities and direction.

Utilize

• Utilize code to design instead of drawing images in design processes.

• Utilize multiple SDK tool sets for the target platform.

Validate

Validate solutions with the architecture team.

Work with

• Work with cross functional agile teams to drive projects through full development cycle.

• Work with cross-functional teams delivering on demanding projects.

• Work with customer-facing colleagues to gather requirements and troubleshoot issues.

• Work with extraordinary teams delivering demanding projects.

• Work with fellow software engineers on definition and development or various automated test cases.

• Work with internal applied researchers to improve their AI tools.

• Work with multi-site teams in release management.

• Work with Product and Sales teams to groom backlog of features.

• Work with product managers and translate product requirements into technical deliverables.

• Work with teams to understand test automation gaps and implement coverage.

• Work with team to develop, execute tests and establish quality goals.

• Work with the Broker Dealer Operations teams to support and enhance the trading system.

• Work with the team to help drive business decisions.

• Work with various teams and technologies to gain deep knowledge of the architecture of our services.

Write

• Write about your experiences in blog posts and talk about them at conferences.

• Write automated component, Integration & E2E test cases.

• Write clean, testable code using C# .NET programming languages.

• Write code to automate processes.

• Write detailed design notes for major driver changes.

• Write, edit and improve technical documentation.

• Write high level driver design documents and test plans of new features.

• Write high quality distributed system software.

• Write new automated tests for existing and new features.

• Write reliable unit, integration, and system level tests.

• Write technical User Stories for backlog.

• Write user and technical specifications in line with business needs.

Most In-demand Hard Skills

The following list describes the most required technical skills of a Software Development Engineer:

1. Java

2. Python

3. Jenkins

4. AWS

5. C++

6. C#

7. Software Development

8. Javascript

9. Design

10. SQL

11. Linux

12. Software Engineering

13. GIT

14. Object-Oriented Design

15. Kubernetes

16. Spring

17. Data Structures

18. React

19. Design Patterns

20. Agile

21. Angular

22. Scala

23. Docker

24. Architecture

25. Rest

26. Spring Boot

27. Oracle

28. Json

29. Junit

30. Computer Engineering

31. Agile Environment

32. Team Culture

33. Azure

34. C

35. Testing

36. Selenium

37. Debugging

38. Distributed Systems

39. Security

40. Spark

Most In-demand Soft Skills

The following list describes the most required soft skills of a Software Development Engineer:

1. Written and oral communication skills

2. Problem-solving attitude

3. Analytical ability

4. Collaborative

5. Organizational capacity

6. Detail-oriented

7. Proactive

8. Interpersonal skills

9. Initiative

10. Work under pressure

11. High-energy

12. Team player

13. Creative

14. Leadership

15. Self-motivated

16. Attention to detail

17. Drive results

18. Sense of ownership

19. Self-starter

20. Work independently with little direction

21. Critical thinker

22. Motivation

23. Verbal and written - and strong relationship

24. Presentation

25. Self-driven

26. Highly motivated

27. Troubleshooting skills

28. Thinking big and scaling fast around the globe

29. Desire

30. Flexible