Link Search Menu Expand Document
The Handbook

IT Roles

This article will explain the different roles that you may encounter in the software engineering field and what their job responsibilities usually cover.

Software Engineer / Developer

These roles are usually synonymous in the field and what many of you will work as. This general purpose role is the main work unit for software projects - they’re main purpose is to code to deliver some business value.

Daily Activities:

  • Coding
  • Architecture
  • Managing Development Systems
  • Project Management
  • Release Management

Quality Assurance (QA) Tester

QAs validate the work done by developers in order to verify that it meets the functional and non-functional requirements of the given tasks.

Daily Activities:

  • Testing
  • Creating Test Plans
  • Regression Testing
  • Release Management

Operations (System Administrator, Network Administrator, Help Desk)

Organizations will have different IT structures, but more often than not they will have a dedicated operations team whose focus is to monitor the health of the overall application and have a toolset for managing issue that happen in production. They will be the lead for resolving issues and have the ability and tools to pull in the necessary teams or resources.

Daily Activities:

  • Monitoring
  • Resolving Production Issues
  • Assisting Developers with System Issues
  • Maintaining Systems

DevOps Engineer

Devops, a new role, are the engineers that creates,manages, and supports the release cycle for developers. The move to continuous integration patterns has increased the need for better tooling to get developer’s code deployed to various systems. This led to the creation of this specific role which is to support the larger software engineering crowd to more easily make their changes.

Daily Activities:

  • Coding
  • Setting up Infrastructure
  • Maintaining Systems
  • Assisting Software Engineers with Setup

Database Administrator

Database administrators are specifically in charge of managing databases. The will have admin access to running systems and may provide guidelines and validation of database changes.

Daily Activities:

  • Monitoring Database Health
  • Monitoring Database Performance
  • Optimizing Database Performance
  • Admin Access in Production (View/Update data)
  • Provide Feedback for Developer Changes

Data Engineers

Data Engineers create the pipelines to move data between business systems to analytic systems for better processing. The format of data used in product facing software may need to be transformed or moved to a system (database) that handles the analytics better. Not really an expert here but they exist!

Data Scientist

Data Scientist analyze the data by using statistical models and machine learning to create a better understanding of the usage of the tool and in order to allow product to make more informed decisions. Again not the most informed but they exist too!