Product Engineer

Product Engineer is a full-stack engineer who builds digital products, integrates APIs and services, designs databases, configures deployments, makes application scalable. Product developer creates great user experiences to increase users acquisition, adoption, activation and retention.

There are 3 product engineering specialities:

Product Engineers in the early-stage startups combine all the roles together: from front-end, to back-end and chats with customers.

All engineering roles are using AI agentic tools heavily to automate their work and ship better products faster.

Design Engineer

Full-stack developer with a focus on front-end (but not limited by that). Builds delightful experience for the app users, that stands out and help achieve goals faster.

Designs modern snappy layouts and marketing pages

Knows UI components libraries in detail, builds components, architects proper design system

Implements subtle animations on interactions and reveals

Familiar with local-first architecture design

Writes clearly in-app copy, applying marketing and design principles to highlight primary actions and simplify users workflows and communicate brand message

Prototypes and builds clear Rest APIs, write backend code, streaming APIs for AI calls

Deploys and scales applications (Vercel, Render, DO Apps, Railway)

System Design Engineer

Full-stack developer with a focus on backend architecture and cloud deployments. Ensures app deploys efficiently, scales fast to handle load and exposes metrics and logs for alerting and deep dives.

Rest API design and implementing endpoints

Database schema design and migrations (SQL and NoSQL / normalised and denormalised)

Database architecture, components and transaction isolation guarantees (WAL, journal, 2PC)

Cache use-cases and scaling (Redis)

Queues, long running jobs, workflows and scheduling: Kafka, Redis BullMQ; Inngest/Trigger.Dev/Upstash

Observability: logging and monitoring (BetterStack/Loggly; ELK stack)

Linux: scripting, init systems, security permissions and firewall

Orchestration: docker/kubernetes; PaaS platforms (DO apps, Render, Vercel; AWS/Google Cloud/Azure)

Deployment and CI (Github Actions)

Backend testing (integration tests, load tests, unit tests)

Writing documentation (Mintlify, Swagger, OpenAPI)

CQRS, Event-sourcing, Idempotency, Eventual Consistency

Writing front-end code and hooking UIs with API (be a design engineer)

Vector databases and RAG: designing AI application with stored state

DevRel (Developer Relations)

DevRel is a full-stack developer who produces content to onboard more people quicker. DevRel writes documentation, writes step-by-step guides, builds demo projects to showcase ideas, shoots video tutorials, engages with developer community, talking with customers.

Learn more from this webpage:

What is DevRel?