Software engineering offers multiple career paths. As software engineers acquire new skills and proficiencies, these paths unlock, allowing engineers to choose the focus and direction of their careers. Whatever path you take, there is need to have a Career Development Plan, this will enable you to identify the software engineering role you want to pursue, learn technical skills, gain the software engineering experience and acquire relevant certifications needed for the role.

In this article we have put together a guide on some of the engineering roles you can consider in your career path including some of the technologies and skills commonly required in these roles. You can used the technologies or skills mentioned as a guide to farmiliarize with them before pursuing your dream role.

Front-End Engineer

A front-end engineer would typically be required to plan, design, build and implement user interface systems of a website, software or web-based applications within an organization. A front-end engineer goal would be to engineer a user interface that is apealing to a user of the said system and that offers great user experience i.e. easy to navigate, no issues, minimal or no downtime, and adaptable to the users device. A front end engineer would be required to Know and have fluency i.e. Junior, intermidiate or senior in front-end frameworks such as React, Angular, or Vue. Have a deep understanding of web development technologies such as Java Script, CSS, and HTML. In order to become a competent front-end engineer follow the Front-end Developer Roadmap as a guide to achieving your goal.

Back-End Engineer

A back-end engineer would typically be required to plan, design, build and implement API’s or micro-services that run in the background within an organization. A back-end engineer goal would be to engineer a service that is . A Back-end engineer would be required to Know and have a level fluency i.e. Junior, intermidiate or senior in back-end frameworks such as Spring, Quakus, or aspNet core.Also Have a deep understanding of the laguages used in these framework technologies such as Java, C#, node js, and SQL. In order to become a competent back-end engineer follow the Back-end Developer Roadmap as a guide to achieving your goal.

DevOps Engineer

As a Devops engineer, you will be required to poses a wide range of knowledge ranging from coding and deployment of front-end and back-end applications, to maintainance aand updates. A devOps engineer goal is to bridge the gap between updating an application to accomodate new or extend existing functionalities while maintaining its reliability. By bridging this gap a product time to market is greatly reduced. Great skills to have as a devops engineer includes the following

  • System administration.
  • System architechture and provisioning.
  • Configuration management.
  • containers and container orchestration.
  • continuous integration and continuous deployment.
  • Experience in writing code and shell scripts. In order to become a competent DevOps engineer follow the DevOps engineer Roadmap as a guide to achieving your goal.

Full Stack Engineer

A full stack engineer is a whole rounded software engineer with a V shaped skillset in that a full stack engineer will have a deep knowledge in one area i.e back-end software development and grow his/her skills on other areas such as Front-End, Back-End, DevOps etc.