Engineering
Frontend Software Engineer
Frontend software engineers are responsible for developing the user interface of a software application. Typically, the term “frontend” engineer refers to a software engineer who develops the interface for dynamic web based applications.
Common components and interactions that you see on the internet that are created by frontend engineers include photo slideshows, animations, button click events, fullscreen video display, page navigation, infinite scrolling, and more.
Mobile Software Engineer
Mobile engineers are similar to frontend engineers in that they develop the interface for software applications; however, these applications are built for mobile devices such as iPhones, Android phones, Windows phones, and hand-held tablets. Most people refer to software applications developed by mobile software engineers as mobile apps or “apps” for short.
Backend Software Engineer
Backend engineers act as a gatekeeper for how data is delivered, transferred, transformed, stored to, and retrieved from databases. Backend software engineers tend to work closely with frontend and mobile engineers because web and mobile applications often send data to be stored in databases and need to retrieve data from databases to be displayed to the end user.
Database Administrator
Database administrators specialize in designing databases, optimizing database performance, and maintaining the integrity of databases from system failure and data corruption. Common tasks of a database administrator includes monitoring the current status of a database system, performance optimization, implementing data backups, running data compliance benchmarks, running data security benchmarks, and running system updates.
Site Reliability Engineer
A site reliability engineer’s (SRE) role is to maintain the integrity and uptime of an entire software system. Popular websites and mobile apps like Facebook.com, Amazon.com, Youtube.com, Instagram, and TikTok receive over a billion visitors per month with millions of server transactions happening every second.
This type of traffic can cause a lot of stress on a system, and if poorly maintained, will cause the entire application to crash. This is where site reliability engineers are needed. They are responsible for monitoring the performance of an entire software system and scaling the system as the number of active users grows on the platform.
DevOps Engineer
DevOps is a software development strategy and philosophy that focuses on monitoring and optimizing the entire software development lifecycle. A DevOps engineer’s responsibility is to establish a system of development, testing, and deployment of code written by software engineers across the entire application.
Embedded Systems Engineer
Embedded systems engineers typically write code that controls hardware devices such as sensors, home appliances, robots, printers, digital cameras, and IoT devices. Web developers, mobile app developers, database administrators are known as application-level developers. Embedded Systems Engineers are known as systems-level engineers.
Code written by an application-level developer does not impact the device’s hardware. In the case of an embedded systems engineer, their code is responsible for giving instructions for how a device’s hardware should perform. For example, when your home’s thermostat reaches a certain temperature, there is embedded code inside the thermostat device that instructs it to send a signal to the home’s A/C unit to either turn on or off the air conditioner.
Game Developer
As the name implies, game developers are software engineers who specialize in the development of video games. Furthermore, there are different types of game developers who are responsible for different parts of a video game’s development lifecycle. For instance, there game developers who specialize in animation, sound, artificial intelligence, server networking, and 3D modeling.
Data Engineer
Data engineers build software systems to store, transfer, monitor, secure, and test large sets of data. With the rise in popularity of software applications being connected to the internet, tech companies are consuming tons of data at the terabyte and petabyte level. Sometimes referred to as “Big Data”.
Data engineers are responsible for building database systems that are able to store and maintain the integrity of this data as well as make it easy for machine learning engineers, data scientists, and data analysts to query this large set of data fairly quickly.
Machine Learning Engineer
Machine learning engineers specialize in a specific subset of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. A machine learning application is one that is able to perform tasks and improve its performance without being directly programmed to do so based on learning from a large amount of data.
Some popular machine learning applications you may notice are Instagram filters, Facebook facial recognition, Tesla’s automated driving system, Siri’s voice recognition, Google Translate, Gmail email spam detection, YouTube’s video recommender feed, etc.
Data Scientist
Due to the societal impact of technology and the internet these days, data has become a hot economic commodity. With that, the role of a data scientist has become even more popular and valuable over the last 10 to 15 years. But, what is a data scientist? A data scientist is an interdisciplinary role that involves knowledge of computer science, machine learning algorithms, statistics, mathematics, informatics, and domain knowledge of whatever application they are working.
A data scientist responsibility is to collect, retrieve, process, and draw insights from large sets of data. Depending on the company they work for and if they have a background in software engineering, they may also be tasked with performing tasks of both a data scientist and machine learning engineer due to the two roles having large overlapping goals.
Security Engineer
As the name implies, security engineers are responsible for maintaining the integrity of a hardware or software application’s security system. They are constantly monitoring a system for any security breaches, running benchmarks to test the system for potential vulnerabilities, and making sure a software or hardware system consistently is in compliance with any legal guidelines and industry standards.
Quality Assurance Engineer
Quality assurance engineers (also known as QA Engineers) are responsible for testing the quality of a software or hardware application before any updates are made public. Depending on the company, they may or may not write code themselves; however, they do need to be tech savvy and understand how certain pieces of an application should behave. If something breaks or there are customer complaints reported by the customer support department, a QA engineer is responsible for identifying what the problem is, and notifying the appropriate team or developer to fix the problem.
Design
UI/UX Designer
UI/UX designers are responsible for creating the design and layout of a software product, which serves as a guideline for software engineers to begin development of the tech product. UI and UX are often used interchangeably, but there is a slight difference. UI stands for user interface, and is a design practice that focuses on the visual aesthetic of a software product. UX stands for user experience, and is a practice that focuses on optimizing a user’s interaction (experience) with a software product.
Graphic Designer
Graphic designers are responsible for designing digital assets and components needed by UI/UX designers and developers. Sometimes a UI/UX designer can take on this role and vice-versa, but graphic design encompasses a broad spectrum of design specialties that includes focus outside of UI/UX such as illustration, logo design, and photo editing.
Internationalization / Localization
Localization Specialist
Localization specialists work on translating text, images, currency symbols, and other UI elements to target a multicultural and multilingual audience. If your company wants to go global, then it is very important that your software products and services have a user friendly interface based on the regions of the world where your users are located.
Product
Product Manager
Product managers are responsible for leading the overall development of a singular technology product by managing the development efforts provided by differing personnel. Within a given tech organization, siloed teams responsible for developing a product are generally composed of four main personnel types: design, engineering, quality assurance, and a product manager.
Product managers own both the technical development and business strategy of a product’s lifecycle. They act as liaison between the internal development team and external stakeholders who have interest in the given product such as upper management, sales and marketing teams, and customers.
Project Manager
In a tech company, one level above the role of a product manager is the project manager. Project managers are responsible for the overall management of a product team including the product manager. The role of product management and project management are oftentimes confused. The key difference between the two is the scope of concern.
A product manager is directly involved in the development of a singular product and communicating its progress to stakeholders. However, a project manager’s job is to make sure the product team has all of the necessary resources it needs to succeed.
A project manager’s responsibility is to make sure the product teams have proper budgets to finish their project, have enough staff to contribute to a product’s development, and communicate a product’s value to upper management.
Data
Data Analyst
Data analytics is the practice of collecting (data mining) and processing data from varying sources with the purpose of drawing insights for making predictions, monitoring performance, and identifying trends. Data analytics is reference to a broad set of analytical practices and a data analysts role and skill set has a strong overlap with other data-driven roles such as business intelligence, business analysts, and data science.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI for short) is data analytics with the constraint of performing analysis based on a company’s internal data sources. A business intelligence analyst’s responsibility is to help upper management make data-driven decisions based on data collected from the company’s internal operations such as sales reports, marketing reports, customer complaints, product usage data, and more. A business intelligence analyst helps management identify internal risk, areas of improvement, and future opportunities.
Information Technology
IT Specialist
An information technologist’s responsibility is to utilize varying technologies to ensure business operations are performant and efficient. Information Technology refers to a broad range of specialties such as security, networking, data management, and hardware maintenance.
Sometimes the role of information technology in software engineering is confused. Engineers focus on the design and creation of new software or hardware technology products whereas information technologists are experts in leveraging existing technology products to execute business tasks.
Systems Admin
A system administrator (a.k.a sysadmin) is responsible for the day-to-day upkeep, configuration, and troubleshooting of a business’s computer systems. Common tasks sysadmins perform include setting up a business’s internal and company-wide network, configuration of a business’s wifi setup, ensuring data on a business’s network is secure, and fixing any hardware failures on company computers. While there are many different IT specialty roles, sysadmin is one of the most common IT roles that most businesses need.
Marketing
Marketing Associate
A marketing associate is responsible for planning and executing marketing and advertising campaigns to promote the company and its products. They may be involved in both online and offline marketing efforts.
Online marketing involves marketing tasks that take place over the internet such as YouTube video ads, Google Ads, and social media marketing.
Offline marketing involves marketing tasks that take place in-person and outside of the internet such as radio ads, television ads, event sponsorships, billboard ads, and more.
SEO Specialist
Search Engine Optimization (a.k.a SEO) is the practice of optimizing web pages to improve their rankings on internet search engines. A SEO specialist is concerned with getting a web page to the top of a search engine’s results page (SERP) based one a given keyword query because the higher a web page ranks on the results page increases the amount of traffic that web page will receive.
Digital Marketer
Digital marketers are marketers who focus on internet-based marketing efforts. Digital marketers specialize in social media marketing, influencer marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and paid advertisement on platforms such as Facebook, Google, and YouTube.
Director of Digital
A director of digital (a.k.a Digital Director) is responsible for overseeing all digital marketing efforts including the tasks executed by an SEO specialist and digital marketer. They are typically the decision-maker for approving a marketing strategy and it’s campaigns. They orchestrate the talents of digital specialists such as videographers, photographers, graphic designers, copywriters, web designers, and SEO specialists, etc., to execute on varying digital marketing campaigns.
Public Relations
Public Relations Specialist
Public Relations (PR) is often confused with marketing, but there is a distinct difference. Marketing focuses on the promotion of a particular product, service, company, or idea whereas PR focuses on the upkeep of a company or individuals reputation.
Common tasks a public relations specialist may perform include booking public speaking engagements for key company personnel, pushing press releases, and planning publicity strategies and campaigns.
Sales
Sales Associate
Sales associates are responsible for closing sales deals with prospective customers. There are two branches of sales known as inbound sales and outbound sales.
Inbound sales refers to potential customers (leads) who have shown interest in a company’s product or services without being directly contacted. Outbound sales focuses on direct outreach efforts such as cold-calling or cold-emailing prospective customers.
A sales associate’s primary objective is to be a point of contact for a prospect, extract valuable information from customer conversations, educate customers on the company’s products and services, and push prospective customers along the sales funnel until a sale is made.
Salesforce Engineer
Salesforce is the #1 sales software company in the world, and has become so prominent that the Salesforce engineer job position was created and is present in almost any large-scale sales teams at most tech companies. A Salesforce engineer develops custom customer relationship management (CRM) workflows and sales teams processes using the Salesforce software.
Account Management
Account Executive
An account executive’s responsibility is to act as a direct point of contact for high-value clients, and monitors that client’s relationship and usage with the company’s products and services. The account executive role can exist under several different departments including sales, marketing, and finance depending on the company; however, the overall goal is to maintain a healthy relation between the client and the company.
Customer Support
Customer Experience Associate
Customer experience associates (CX) are responsible for troubleshooting problems and answering questions from clients. Sometimes the information on a company’s website or help manuals are not enough to satisfy a customer’s experience with a product or service. In the case that a client has trouble with a product or service, they call the customer support number to speak with a customer experience associate for help.
Finance
Finance Manager
A finance manager is responsible for maintaining the financial health of a company. Finance managers create financial reports, devise short-term and long-term financial plans, and advise on investment decisions. Financial managers assist with any finance related initiatives a company is involved in such as mergers and acquisitions, IPO, payroll planning, investments, and market analysis.
Accounting
Accountant
Accountants are responsible for ensuring all monetary transactions are tracked, analyzed, and reported. Accountants are essential in the growth of any company for both legal reasons and performance reasons.
Quarterly and/or annually, all incorporated companies must report their financial statements to the government, and any money unaccounted for could place a company in poor-standing with regulatory bodies (i.e IRS).
From a performance perspective, accountants provide financial reports to executives that inform them of the company’s financial standing, which executives utilize on where to budget the company’s capital.
Legal
Corporate Lawyer
Corporate lawyers are legal representatives that act on behalf of the company. They perform many different tasks such as making sure their company adheres to any regulatory laws, devise contracts, interpret contracts, monitor copyrights, trademarks, and patents, and act as legal counsel incase of a lawsuit against the company.
In the tech industry, there are major regulations in regards to data protection such as GDPR and HIPPA that a company’s legal team must ensure that their company is compliant. Also, a lot of software development teams use open-source software to build company products. It is important for company leadership to be aware of any intricate details concerning the legal usage of third-party software.
For instance, some third-party software have license agreements that state any source code developed with this technology must be publicly shared. This is a critical detail in deciding which open source software to use to avoid being forced to expose any company trade secrets.
Business Operations
Business Development
Business development (a.k.a biz dev) entails strategies, campaigns, and initiatives that aim to produce growth opportunities for a company. The role of a business development representative or manager is to seek out opportunities that will help the companies market expansion.
Tasks include forming strategic partnerships with other companies, customer research to discover needle-moving product development decisions, and attending industry conferences and events to learn emerging trends in the market that the company can leverage.
Some examples of strategic partnerships established in the tech industry include Spotify partnering with Uber to give riders free access to it’s premium song package, Yahoo partnering with Microsoft to repackage Microsoft’s Bing search engine to power Yahoo’s search, and Mozilla Firefox web browser partnered with Google to power is URL address bar’s search functionality.
Human Resources
Human Resources Officer
Human resources oversees all concerns pertaining to employee relations and experiences within the company. From managing recruiting new employees, addressing employee complaints, being an overall resource for all employees to utilize for questions, comments, or concerns relating to the organization as a whole.
C-Suite
Chief Executive Officer
The chief executive officer (CEO) is the top leader of a company. The CEO’s responsibility is to lead company vision and be the final decision-maker for any high-level decisions needed for the department managers to follow.
The role of CEO has a distinct set of objectives other than being a decision-maker of other top-level managers: managing the other high-level executives, signing-off on departmental budgets, raising investment capital, communicating on behalf of the company to it’s shareholders, the government, and the public, and setting department-level project objectives.
Chief Technology Officer
The chief technology officer (CTO) position exists in practically all tech companies. The CTO is the highest position in the company that is responsible for leading the company’s engineering efforts. A CTO typically has a background in engineering: computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, etc. For growing tech startups, this role is typically held by the company’s first engineer or at least one of the engineers on the founding team.
Chief Financial Officer
The chief financial officer (CFO) is the highest position in the company that leads the company’s finances. CFOs closely monitor the financial health of a company and are involved in setting company-wide budgets for recruiting, project development, office expansion, and payroll.
The CFO is responsible for making sure the company is in compliance with any regulatory bodies like the SEC and IRS. The CFO along with the CEO are two primary leaders working to help the company prepare for an initial public offering (IPO), acquire another company, or plan an exit strategy should the company decide to merge with another.
Chief Operations Officer
The chief operations officer (COO) is the highest position in the company responsible for the handling of internal affairs and management of the company’s day-to-day operations. The COO is the closest position to the CEO working as second-in-command. While the CEO is the company’s visionary for external affairs and forward-thinking initiatives, the COO is focused on the company’s internal success.
Board of Directors
Board Member
A board member on the board of directors acts as a fiduciary on behalf of company shareholders. Board members are elected positions that are composed of internal company representatives and external members. They make decisions such as hiring and firing personnel including high-level executives, decide executive compensation, decide policies relating to shareholders such as stock offerings, and generally serve as counsel in advising high-level executives on decision-making.
Chairman of the Board
The chairman of the board or board chairman is the leader of the board responsible for running board meetings and ensuring effective communication amongst high-level execs and other board members.
Research and Development
Research and Development Scientist
Research and development (a.k.a R&D) initiatives are typically roles that exist in tech companies with large budgets and high amounts of capital. A R&D scientist works on the frontlines of cutting edge technology that sometimes doesn’t currently exist in the market. R & D’s objectives are for long-term investments with hopes of giving the company a competitive advantage on the market that would make it hard for competitors to catch up.
Some well known R&D departments are Google X, Tesla, and Apple. Famous projects that came out of these departments include Google Self-Driving cars, Google Glasses, improved battery life that power Tesla electric vehicles, and the iPhone.