Software engineering is a rapidly growing field with vast career opportunities. Software career path offers diverse options, from developing mobile applications and games to creating sophisticated software systems that power businesses and industries. With emerging technologies like AI, machine learning, and blockchain, the demand for software engineers has skyrocketed.
This blog will explore some of the most exciting software career options and what you need to do to get started.
Types of Software Career
Any software career begins with the roles of coding and fixing bugs. Different professionals make unique career tracks based on the industry, experience, and employers. Well-defined software career objectives that align with passion and constant acquisition of relevant skills are the deciding factors of a successful profession in the industry. KnowlegeHut offers the best programming certification that adds significant value to the resumes of software career aspirants for various job titles.
Following is the list of several job roles in the software field:
Software Developers
Software developers create new software with functionalities that achieve predetermined business goals. The roles and responsibilities among different positions vary according to the requirements of the projects and target software solutions.
The following are the positions that constitute a software development team.
Individual Contributor
Irrespective of primary roles and responsibilities as a part of the team involved in the development and maintenance of software, every software engineer passes through three levels as an individual contributor. These levels consist of junior engineer, engineer, and senior engineer. The average salary of an individual contributor is estimated to be approximately $141,820.
Junior Engineer
Junior software engineers provide support to the development and maintenance of software. They receive requests from the development team, fulfill them using programs, fix bugs, and document the issues for future reference. In addition, they participate in team meetings and interact with clients to understand their requirements and work efficiently.
The average annual compensation of junior software engineers is $100,915. The package costs $66,000, while it may go up to $157,000.
Engineer
Software engineers are more proficient than junior engineers, and they fulfil the requirements of complex codes. They perform at various stages of the software development cycle. They must know the functioning and implementation of diverse programs, tools, and techniques.
The salary of mid-level software engineers lies between $68,000 and $166,000, with an average of $105,631.
Senior Engineer
Senior software engineers play managerial and executive roles in the development and upgradation of software. They prioritize and execute tasks in the development cycle, collaborating with internal teams and vendors to fix issues and improve products. As executives, they verify and validate software and recommend debugging and improvisations as required.
The average salary of a senior software engineer is $144,118 per year. It varies between $95,000 and $222,000, depending on the employer and geographical location.
Team Leader
Also called the software engineering manager, the team leader is the first level of the management panel of the software development team. The roles of team leader include:
- Realization of the project requirements
- Allotment and monitoring tasks for team members
- Evaluation of deliverables and suggestions to the team members to improve the products
The average salary of a team leader is $221,585 per year, while it may vary between $177,000 and $349,000. The salary depends on the employer's software development scale and the capabilities to lead a team.
VP of Engineering
The Vice President of Engineering is an executive who oversees the entire engineering department, supervising all the ongoing projects. He reports directly to the chief technology officer and engages in high-profile decision-making processes. The qualification for the position is adequate experience as a software engineer and exceptional management skills. Other responsibilities of the VP of Engineering include:
- Involvement in recruitment processes
- Preparation and optimization of budget
- Development of a team to improve the quality of software solutions.
The average salary of a VP of engineering is $279,076 per year, while the possible range is $167,000 to $477,000.
Freelance/Contract
The freelancers' software career path differs from permanent employees working in the same domain. Though they do not have the facility of promotions, they can expand their base of clients, creating more opportunities to contribute to new projects. Additionally, they must have higher risk-taking and presentation skills to earn projects.
The freelancers, irrespective of their years of experience, earn between $66,000 and $168,000. The average salary of freelancers is $105,000.
Software Engineers
Software and information technology are closely related branches of computing technology that differ by the modalities and tools employed to create products and deliver services. Software engineer positions vary by their functions and diverse aspects of software development, handling, and data management.
Front End Developer
A front-end developer is a software engineer who designs the part of the software used by the visitors. The principal component of the portion is the user interface which contains commands, hyperlinks, text content, and layout designs. Thus, these engineers must have design skills and data structure and algorithms basics. Python, CSS, JavaScript, HTML, Angular JS, polymer, and Backbone are the required programming languages.
The salaries of front-end developers range from $84,000 and $195,000, with an average salary of $127,000.
Back-End Engineers
They are software engineers who create, maintain, test and debug the back end of websites and applications. They collaborate with clients as the back-end elements need workups and management even after building the applications. Their responsibilities include the management and optimization of scalable distributed systems in the cloud.
The average salary of back-end engineers is $126,000 and may vary between $80,000 and $204,000.
Full-Stack Developer
Full-stack developers perform coding for both back-end and front-end aspects of websites and applications. They require understanding and expertise in diverse programming languages and designing user interfaces. Their operations require collaborations with different team members fulfilling front-end and back-end requirements, including data analysis.
They earn from $75,000 to $196,000, with an average annual salary of $120,724.
QA Engineer
Quality assurance involves the evaluation of programs and codes for issues, bugs, and errors that introduces setbacks to the functionalities reducing the efficiency of the software solutions. QA engineers must have a strong understanding of diverse programming languages involved in software development and maintenance aspects.
The average salary of QA engineers is $86,000 per year, which may vary between $60,000 and $125,000.
Data Engineer
Data engineers develop or strategize software to retrieve, sort, and process raw data to extract meaningful information to assess an operation. They must have advanced knowledge and the ability to tackle databases and to build tools to handle big data. They must also be able to identify and employ programming languages to process data.
The average salary of data engineers is $110,000 per year.
Mobile Developer
Mobile developers create software compatible with mobile devices, including smartphones. Java and React are two preferred programming languages. They devise user interface solutions and back-end elements for a fully functional application. Further, they test their prototypes for errors and bugs and solve them to optimize efficiency.
The average salary of mobile developers is $98,900, while the packages vary from $61,000 and $160,000.
DevOps Engineer
It is a high-profile position that demands high proficiency in programming. Its primary role is to create systems, tools, and methodologies designed to improve technologies. They fulfil administrative including infrastructure management and networking resources. They write shell scripts to automate repetitive tasks and implement agile developmental practices.
The average pay for DevOps engineers is $131,925, while the highest salary is $209,000.
Cloud Engineer
Cloud engineers fulfil the requirements of designing, migrating, maintaining, and supporting a company's operations in the cloud. They oversee the architecture, configuration, and deployment of applications through the cloud. They investigate the cloud for bugs that jeopardize data privacy.
On average, cloud engineers earn $151,565 per year. The salary may vary between $94,000 and $251,000.
Quality Assurance
QA professionals navigate through computer software careers with quick increments in comprehending software development processes and operations. They conduct code reviews and performance testing to identify errors in codes and defects in the functionalities. Further, they also automate the testing processes to optimize the quality control protocols. The average salary for a quality assurance engineer in the United States is approximately around $80,522 per annum.
Analysts
Software analysts are responsible for assessing and running existing applications through quality checks to identify code errors. Using the outcomes of the tests, they determine additional functionalities required to improve the performance of applications, servers, and software infrastructures. The profession is part of critical software careers as the optimizations contribute to the privileges under network resources and financial constraints. The estimated annual compensation for an analyst in the software industry may range between $50,478 to $119,109.
Testers
Software testers are responsible for identifying flaws in the codes that impact their performance affecting user experience. They run manual and automated tests in different environments, assess them, write bug reports, and communicate the findings with technical and nontechnical members. They make the facets of the quality assurance team. Software testers earn an average annual salary of $97,654.
How to Boost your Software Career?
The primary software career guidance is to expand and deepen the knowledge of programming languages. Nowadays, online education platforms are offering high-quality software training and internships. However, tech-passionate students benefit from the top Software Engineering courses that lay a strong foundation for a software career.
Bottom Line
The software industry opens sample opportunities to ambitious software aspirants as it is an ever-growing industry due to the limitless scope for technological advancements. Parallelly, the competition for jobs in the industry is also impeccable that demands outstanding sets of technical and soft skills. Hence, we recommend KnowledgeHut Programming certification to deepen your knowledge and skills in programming.
