Level Up Your Postman Game to Land Your Dream Job

If you’re looking for a new job, you might have noticed that some organizations require hands-on experience with Postman or list it as a desired skill. You might already know Postman as a trusty sidekick to help you out in a pinch, but did you know that harnessing the power of Postman can make you more marketable?

Postman is currently used by more than 4M people worldwide. While its popularity is a welcome surprise, something that may surprise you even more is the different types of people that rely on Postman for their everyday jobs. Postman supports every stage of API development, and our users have discovered many different ways to use Postman.

Top 3 jobs requiring Postman experience

API engineers

An API engineer is a new breed of developer emerging alongside the explosive growth of APIs and microservices. These engineers might be focused on platform optimizations or integrations with partners. For these engineers, using Postman is a time saver. Postman collections are an efficient way to describe your API, and sharing these collections is an easy way to communicate about your API and collaborate on them. Engineers who are responsible for onboarding new team members use Postman collections as a way to catalog and describe their APIs so everyone stays on the same page.

“API first, code later” is now the default in many agile engineering organizations. Similar to how developers use an integrated development environment (IDE) for software development, developers who work with APIs rely on Postman as an API development environment (ADE). If you’re interviewing for an API engineering role, your experience with Postman is a testament to your familiarity with APIs and integrations.

QA / automation engineers

A tester’s usage of Postman runs the gamut. Some will focus on frontend testing, backend testing, or anything in between. Some use Postman mock servers to isolate testing scenarios, and writing tests in Postman enables testers to automate testing using the collection runner, monitors, or Newman.

Many testing roles require a minimum of 1 year using Postman or similar tools in this advanced capacity. Job candidates with this level of skill and experience will be the most competitive for these types of roles. Even if you use Postman on a daily basis, but haven’t yet gotten the swing of using Postman for tests and automation, you’re just getting started.

Frontend / backend developers

Similar to how a frontend developer uses Postman as a client to inspect and explore responses from an endpoint, a backend developer will also use Postman as a client to execute actions on their endpoint. Decoupling this development process allows organizations with a split stack architecture to proceed independent of another team’s progress (or lack of progress). Postman has the versatility of a Swiss Army knife to allow you to easily test, debug, document, and share your collections.

The explosion of APIs is evident in organizations with internal microservices as well as integrations with public SaaS solutions. Experience with Postman demonstrates to interviewers that as a frontend, backend, or full stack developer, you know how to work efficiently with APIs. Interviewers are assessing your technical qualifications and also your ability to work at an organization dealing with APIs at scale.

Honorable mentions

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting thousands of Postman users, and it’s always interesting to hear how they’re using it. This is how their experience with Postman makes them more marketable by increasing their on-the-job skills and also how it helps throughout the interview process.

DevOps engineers

DevOps engineers use Postman monitors to monitor the health of their APIs. Similar to automation engineers, they use Postman’s command line tool Newman to integrate their test suites with their CI/CD pipeline. Postman collections serve as recipes for deployment utilizing the Digital Ocean, AWS, or other infrastructure APIs.

DevOps engineers use Postman to not only show off their automation skills, but also demonstrate their ability to share and updates docs when working on APIs across teams.

Product managers

Product Managers use Postman to explore and test their own APIs for final sign-off on product delivery after the goals of every stakeholder are achieved. Furthermore, they keep tabs on changes to shared collections and updates through the activity feed in Postman to ensure development and testing is progressing as scheduled.

Sometimes it’s the Product Manager who makes the decision for a team to use the collaboration features in Postman Pro or Enterprise when the broader team is already using Postman on their own, separately. It’s not usually the job of a Product Manager to recommend tooling for engineers, but in this case, it can make you a hero.

Sales engineers

Sales engineers are part of the sales and business development team tasked with determining the technological fit between two companies. These engineers provide technical demos to prospects frequently using Postman as a faster way to build an integration with a partner.

During the interview process, time may be a limited resource. Some interviewers may ask you to build a proof of concept or engage in an in-depth discussion about their tech. Postman makes it easy to do this research and set up a demo really quickly. If you’re lucky, the company has shared a Postman collection using the Run in Postman button in their API documentation which makes it supremely easy to get up and running with their API.

Support engineers

Postman is a convenient way to assist customers with troubleshooting API calls. Support engineers use Postman to reproduce issues their clients are facing and to troubleshoot API calls, frequently sending and receiving Postman collections as examples to demonstrate the observed behavior. It’s an effective communication tool when you can explicitly identify what is contributing to the expected or unexpected behavior of an endpoint.

Interviewers may not expect you to come into these roles with Postman experience, but they will expect you to get up to speed quickly, and someone with Postman experience will be ahead of the curve.

Developer evangelists

Developer evangelists work with the marketing and engineering teams to build demos and tutorials. Frequently called upon to do public presentations, developer evangelists use Postman as a live coding environment to demonstrate their technology.

Similar to the interview process for a sales engineer, interviewers might expect you to build a demo using their tech or engage in a meaningful discussion about it. Using Postman is a real time saver and allows you to do the research efficiently.

Technical writers

Technical writers use Postman to explore and document the technology they are researching. Some writers responsible for documentation may use the Run in Postman button to embed collections and environments into their developer portal or rely on Postman documentation to automatically generate API documentation viewable on a web page.

Interviewers may not expect technical writers to have proficiency using tools like Postman, but they do expect them to do the research and get up to speed. Postman is a secret weapon that is used by technical writers to explore the technology.

Non-technical staff

It’s not just developers who are using Postman. For staff who aren’t in technical roles, but work at a tech company, it can be difficult to grok exactly what their company does. Postman is an approachable way to demonstrate technology to non-technical people and is sometimes used in onboarding and training for them as well.

Interviewers for non-technical roles at a tech company will rarely expect you to have experience using Postman, but if you get a technical interviewer, they will be impressed that you know how to use Postman. Having that skill demonstrates a certain level of curiosity and self-sufficiency and is a signal to a technical interviewer that you will make their lives easier by not pestering them with questions at every turn.

tl;dr

Sure, Postman can make your life easier, but it can also help you get ahead. If you’re not where you want to be yet, it’s time to level up your Postman game.