Software Engineer Job Description [With Examples]

A software engineering job description should inform the potential candidates about your company and its culture, products they will be working on, their work profile and general expectations. For clarity, you can discuss all this under different headings such as a job brief, responsibilities, skills and qualifications, equal employment opportunities statement, benefits, and company culture.

Job Brief

The aim of a job brief is to give the potential candidates an idea of what they can expect to do when they join the company. It should touch upon:

• What pain points you are trying to solve for your customers
• Projects they will be working on
• Teams they will be part of
• Technologies being used at your organization
• The general work culture and environment

Objectives

In this section you should talk about why you are hiring a software engineer:

• Is this a new position?
• Are you scaling up your software and hence expanding the existing teams?
• Are you building new software?
• Is your organization adopting new technology?

Responsibilities

A software engineer is responsible for designing, building and shipping software. Right from prototyping and designing functional code to coding and testing, they take ownership of the software until it is handed over to the client (internal or external).

Here are the most common responsibilities for software engineers:

• Applying software engineering principles to analyze and problem-solve, and design a solution
• Developing and executing project plans
• Creating technical specifications
• Designing and developing test cases
• Adopting Agile methodologies to develop software
• Analyzing existing systems to provide recommendations for improvement
• Ensuring proper documentation
• Monitoring system performance and performing predictive maintenance
• Performing system risk and reliability analysis
• Assessing new technologies before adoption and implementation

Skills and Qualifications

Here, list the skills and qualifications applicants must possess to be shortlisted:

• Bachelor’s or higher degree in computer science or related field
• Proficient in Java, C++ and other object-oriented programming languages
• Hands-on experience working with technologies (mention the technologies that you use, such as Hadoop, Pig, Oozie, MapReduce, Spark, Sqoop, Kafka, Flume, etc.)
• Strong DevOps focus
• Experience building and deploying infrastructure with cloud deployment technologies (mention the technologies you use)
• Well versed in designing, debugging and documentation
• Prior experience working with test-driven development and automated testing frameworks
• Experience with Scrum/Agile development methodologies
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Analytical and logical thinking
• Strong problem-solving skills
• Ability to work without supervision

Preferred Qualifications

Use this section to add the “good to have” qualifications. This is especially relevant when you are hiring for entry- or junior-level positions and should not expect highly qualified candidates.

Here are some examples of preferred qualifications for software engineers:

• Worked as technical lead
• Experience building APIs and services using REST, SOAP, JSON, RPC, etc.
• Experience with automation technologies such as Apache Ant, Jenkins and Maven (if you use commercial tools such as Bamboo, Travis CI, etc., mention it here)
• Ability to update and manage GitHub repositories

You may also include other details such as benefits you offer, what to include with an application (e.g., if you want a GitHub portfolio), any conditions to employment, and/or an equal employment opportunity statement for legal reasons. Additionally, mention whether you allow work from home or flextime.