Engineering Roles and Skills Questions

Comprehensive overview of common software engineering role families, the responsibilities associated with each, and the skills and experience typically expected at different seniority levels. Includes backend engineering, frontend engineering, full stack engineering, mobile engineering, platform and development operations engineering, site reliability engineering, data engineering, machine learning engineering, and solutions engineering. For each role explain core responsibilities and typical deliverables, the technical skill categories that matter such as programming languages, frameworks, databases and data systems, messaging and integration patterns, application programming interfaces, cloud platforms, containerization and infrastructure as code, observability and monitoring, and deployment pipelines. Describe typical backgrounds and hiring signals, how expectations and influence evolve from junior through mid level, senior, staff and principal levels, and the shift from task execution to system design, ownership and cross team leadership. Discuss how role definitions and hiring criteria change with company size, product domain, and organizational model, and how different engineering roles collaborate across the product lifecycle. Provide practical guidance for translating job descriptions into candidate qualifications and for assessing technical and behavioral indicators through code exercises, system design discussions, production incident reviews, metrics driven outcomes, and examples of mentorship and leadership. Conclude with role specific interview focus areas and preparation strategies for candidates targeting each family.