The software engineer (SWE) is the most common role that you are bound to interact with in any organization, regardless of its size. Software engineers play a pivotal role not only in designing and building new pieces of software, but also in operating and maintaining existing and legacy systems.
Depending on their experience level and technical expertise, SWEs are classified into three categories:
- Junior engineer: A junior engineer is someone who has recently started their software development career and lacks the necessary experience to build and deploy production-grade software. Companies are usually keen on hiring junior engineers as it allows them to keep their hiring costs low. Furthermore, companies often pair promising junior engineers with senior engineers in an attempt to grow them into mid-level engineers and retain them for longer.
- Mid-level engineer: A typical mid-level engineer is someone who has at least three years of software development experience. Mid-level engineers are expected to have a solid grasp of the various aspects of the software development life cycle and are the ones who can exert a significant impact on the amount of code that's produced for a particular project. To this end, they not only contribute code, but also review and offer feedback to the code that's contributed by other team members.
- Senior engineer: This class of engineer is well-versed in a wide array of disparate technologies; their breadth of knowledge makes them ideal for assembling and managing software engineering teams, as well as serving as mentors and coaches for less senior engineers. From their years of experience, senior engineers acquire a deep understanding of a particular business domain. This trait allows them to serve as a liaison between their teams and the other, technical or non-technical, business stakeholders.
Another way to classify software engineers is by examining the main focus of their work:
- Frontend engineers work exclusively on software that customers interact with. Examples of frontend work include the UI for a desktop application, a single-page web application for a software as a service (SaaS) offering, and a mobile application running on a phone or other smart device.
- Backend engineers specialize in building the parts of a system that implement the actual business logic and deal with data modeling, validation, storage, and retrieval.
- Full stack engineers are developers who have a good understanding of both frontend and backend technologies and no particular preference of doing frontend or backend work. This class of developers is more versatile as they can easily move between teams, depending on the project requirements.