Associate Software Engineer

An Associate Software Engineer works to help build, modify and maintain software solutions. As an Associate Level, you are expected to be learning while also working on real world applications. When placed on a team, you are expected to be a welcomed member and be productive. It is expected that you have a basic understanding of typical development practices and some real world practical applications of them. You must be able to follow standard procedures and be able to work well with others.

Due to the breadth of domains a Software Engineer can explore during their career it’s difficult to list specifics about each one. Instead we use the term “core technical skill set” to refer to a reasonable industry standard grouping of a domain. Examples include but are not limited to Application Engineering, Cloud Engineering, DevOps Engineering, Data Engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering, etc.

A typical Software Engineer at this level would demonstrate the vast majority of these qualities continuously for at least a year.

• At least one development methodology (i.e., Agile, Scrum, etc) and working together in iterations/sprints
• Software architecture and design
• Planning, designing and estimation techniques and managing your own workload
• Reviewing work items assigned to you, asking clarifying questions, understanding and completing them with accuracy and efficiency

Operations

• Collaborating with source control, pull requests and code reviews
• Contributing to deployment pipelines and the systems that deliver code to environments
• Assisting in monitoring production applications and where possible providing production level support

Collaboration

• Be a team player, seek different ways to add value and help the team minimize risks, issues and impediments
• Have courtesy/tact and be effective working with other people
• Understand the different roles on the team and their responsibilities

 Influence and Impact

• Provide information clearly and concisely, demonstrate care by proactively sharing updates and impediments without being asked.
• Conduct research and analysis and be able present your findings
• Operate with a sense of care and urgency

Orientation to learn

• Demonstrate self-development and the ability to pursue learning
• Stay up to date with the industry as well as the direct needs of your team

Skills and Qualifications

Software Engineers explore a variety of domains throughout their careers. One may start with front end development and then transition to back end. An application engineer may start learning DevOps and eventually support a product as an SRE. 

A typical Software Engineer at this level would meet the qualifications in at least one of the following domains.

Web front end

• Competent in HTML/CSS/JScript
• Competent in at least one framework (Angular, React, Vue, Svelte, etc.) 

 Service back end

• Competent in at least one programming language (JavaScript, C#, GoLang, Python, etc)
• Competent in at least one framework (Express.js, .Net etc)
• Competent in Application Design (APIs, Integrations, REST, GraphQL, MVC, Websockets, etc)
• Competent in common coding concepts (Design Patterns, Functional Programming, DDD, TDD, DRY, SOLID, etc)

Data

• Competent in manipulating common data formats (JSON, CSV, XML, etc)
• Competent in at least one data technology (RDBMS, NoSQL, etc)
• Exposure to different data processing techniques (ORM/ODM, OLAP/OLTP, ODBC, Batch, Streaming, etc)

Specialized Domains

Mobile front end

• Competent in iOS or Android
• Competent in Objective-C or Java
• Competent in at least one framework (Flutter, Xamarin, Ionic, etc)

Cloud

• Competent in at least one Cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc)
• Competent in at least one Cloud Architecture (Docker/Containers, Serverless, Amplify, Netlify, JAMStack, etc)

Security

• Competent in common security concepts (threats, vulnerabilities, exploits, etc) 
• Competent in security protection techniques and sources (code scanning, dependency updates, OWASP top 10, etc)
• Competent in secure coding practices (input/output validations, sanitization, error checking, filtering, RBAC, etc)
• Competent in cryptography (in transit and at rest, SSL, ciphers, certificates, etc)
• Exposure to regulatory and compliance laws and concepts (Data Privacy, GDPR, CCPA, Health, HIPAA, PII, PHI, Accessibility, WCAG, etc)

DevOps

• Competent in at least one SCM (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc)
• Competent with at least one IaC technology (CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform, Kubernetes, etc)
• Competent in working with and updating pipelines

SRE

• Competent in at least one observability area (monitoring, logging)
• Competent in at least one observability technology (ELK, Prometheus, DataDog, New Relic, Splunk, etc)