.NET Lead

We're looking for a hands-on C#/. NET Lead who can design, build, and ship cloud-native systems; lead a squad of engineers; and partner directly with Kickdrum leadership and customer teams. You'll move fast, own outcomes, and set a high technical bar across backend, cloud, data, and modern TypeScript frontends.

Responsibilities:

• Lead a team of 3-6 engineers to deliver modern, cloud-native software from discovery to production. Review and approve estimates, designs, code, and test plans.
• Translate business requirements into clear technical designs, tasks, and release plans; drive sprint execution and remove blockers.
• Design and evolve distributed architectures on Azure or AWS: microservices, event-driven systems, APIs, and background workers.
• Build services in C#/ASP. NET Core (REST/gRPC) and use them. NET. Use Aspire and Dapr building blocks where appropriate, use EF Core for data access, and guide healthy API contracts (OpenAPI/Swagger).
• Engineer robust data layers: deep SQL Server expertise (query tuning, indexing, isolation levels, and deadlocks); Dapper and/or EF Core; and pragmatic use of NoSQL (Cosmos DB/MongoDB), caching (Redis), and search (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch).
• Architect eventing and integration with Azure Event Hubs/Service Bus, Kafka, or SQS/SNS; select and justify eventual vs immediate consistency strategies.
• Establish observability using OpenTelemetry (OTEL) for tracing/metrics/logs; integrate with Application Insights, Prometheus/Grafana, or ELK.
• Champion API-first development (OpenAPI/Swagger), security (OAuth2/OIDC, Azure AD/Entra, Key Vault/Secrets Manager), and reliability patterns (circuit breakers, retries, idempotency).
• Guide frontend engineers using TypeScript and React (and optionally Angular): API contracts, state management, performance, and DX.
• Ship MVPs in weeks (not months), run data-driven iterations, and communicate progress crisply to stakeholders.

Requirements:

• 8-12+ years in software engineering with 3+ years leading teams as a tech lead/lead engineer.
• Strong C# across both. NET Framework and modern. NET production experience with ASP. NET Core and REST/gRPC services.
• Experience working with. NET Framework systems (reading legacy code, stabilising, and planning upgrades).
• Familiarity with the. NET Upgrade Assistant, code analysers, multi-targeting, and compatibility shims is a plus here.
• Deep SQL Server skills: T-SQL, query plans, indexing strategies, isolation/locking, deadlock analysis, DMVs/profiling.
• Experience with. NET Aspire (AppHost/ServiceDefaults, components, and dashboard) and Dapr (service invocation, pub/sub, state, and bindings), plus EF Core for data access; can articulate when to use Aspire/Dapr vs direct SDKs.
• CI/CD (Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions/Jenkins), IaC (Bicep/ARM/Terraform).
• Practical EF Core and data-access patterns.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems: idempotency, sagas/outbox, partitioning/sharding, eventual consistency, and resiliency patterns.
• Frontend leadership exposure with TypeScript and React (routing, state management, testing, and performance).
• Testing culture: xUnit/NUnit, mocking, contract testing (e. g., Pact), API/integration tests, Playwright/Cypress/Jest where relevant, and CI quality gates.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management.

Cloud-native design on Azure and/or AWS, including:

• Containers (Docker, Kubernetes/AKS/EKS), networking, secrets, and cost/performance trade-offs.
• Compute (AKS/EKS, App Service, Functions/Lambda) and Containers (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Data: Cosmos DB/MongoDB, Redis/ElastiCache, file/object storage.
• Messaging/streaming: Event Hubs/Service Bus, Kafka, SQS/SNS.
• Observability with OpenTelemetry; dashboards/alerts (App Insights, Grafana, CloudWatch).

Nice to have:

• AI-assisted development with Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar; experience setting team guardrails for AI-assisted coding.
• Built/shipped AI features using Azure AI Foundry (Azure OpenAI), AWS Bedrock, and Ollama/llama.cpp ; familiarity with LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or other agentic SDKs; RAG patterns and vector stores (Azure AI Search, Pinecone, Redis Stack, and pgvector).
• Frontend depth with Next.js, Vite, performance budgets, and accessibility.
• Security and compliance: OWASP ASVS/Top 10 secrets management and threat modelling.
• Experience with feature flags, A/B testing, and product analytics.
• Domain-driven design, clean architecture, and migration strategies from the legacy. NET Framework to modern. NET.

Technologies:

• Backend: C#, . NET Framework, and. NET 6/7/8/9+, ASP. NET Core, gRPC, . NET Aspire, Dapr, EF Core, Azure Functions/AWS Lambda.
• Frontend: TypeScript, React (preferred), Angular (nice to have), Vite/Webpack, Jest/Cypress, Storybook.
• Data: SQL Server, Cosmos DB/DynamoDB/MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Azure Blob Storage, S3
• Messaging/Streaming: Azure Event Hubs/Service Bus, Kafka, SQS/SNS.
• Cloud/DevOps: Azure (preferred) / AWS, Docker, Kubernetes (AKS/EKS), Terraform/Bicep, GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps/Jenkins.
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Application Insights, Prometheus/Grafana, ELK, AWS CloudWatch, and X-Ray.
• Security: OAuth2/OIDC, Azure AD/Entra, Key Vault/Secrets Manager.