SUMMARY:
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POSITION INFO:
ENVIRONMENT:
OUR client in ClimateTech seeks a hands-on Technical Architect and Senior Backend Developer to take ownership of the platform’s end-to-end technical design and personally lead the build of its core Backend services. You will be the design authority for its Azure-native, microservices-based architecture and a Senior Engineer writing C# code in the cluster — equally comfortable in a whiteboard session with stakeholders, in a code review on a plugin assembly, and in a war-room debugging a production data ingestion job. The successful candidate must have 8+ years of professional Software Engineering with at least the last 4 in a Senior, Architect, or Tech-Lead capacity on production cloud systems. You will also require deep C# and .NET expertise: .NET Core / .NET 6+ (and ideally .NET 8/10), ASP.NET Core, EF Core, async/await fluency, performance tuning, and modern C# language features.
DUTIES:
Architecture and technical leadership -
- Own the end-to-end technical architecture of the platform across the application plane (AKS), the data and analytics plane (Databricks/Delta Lake), and the DevOps/observability plane.
- Maintain and evolve the architecture documentation, decision records (ADRs), and reference diagrams; make and defend trade-off decisions with the CTO and product leadership.
- Define the service decomposition strategy, inter-service contracts, and the rules of engagement for the custom Orchestration Layer that mediates communication between Kubernetes services.
- Set non-functional standards — performance, scalability, resilience, security, observability — and verify the system meets them.
- Lead architecture reviews, code reviews, and design sessions; mentor Mid-level and Junior Engineers and grow the team’s depth in .NET, Azure, and distributed systems.
Hands-on Backend Engineering -
- Personally design, build, and maintain core Backend microservices in C# / .NET 10 (Ingestion, API, Auth, Orchestration) running in containers on AKS.
- Build out the Generic Data Ingestion Layer — the abstraction, the standardised internal data models, and the plugin SDK that other engineers use to onboard new data sources.
- Implement and review C# plugin assemblies for specific energy-domain sources: industrial meters (mines and smelters), invoice ingestion, ERP/financial system integrations, MES, and SAWEM market gateway.
- Design schemas and access patterns for the sharded SQL Server estate, the Redis caching layer, and Blob/ADLS storage; own data-tier performance and consistency.
- Implement secure runtime configuration (Azure Key Vault via CSI), workload identity, and authentication/authorisation flows backed by Entra ID.
- Build the integration surface between the operational AKS plane and the Databricks data platform — feeding Bronze, consuming Gold, and serving low-latency ML inference endpoints from AKS.
Delivery, quality, and operations -
- Own the GitHub-based CI/CD pipelines into Azure Container Registry and AKS, including build, test, scan, and progressive deployment strategies.
- Embed observability from day one — structured Serilog logging, Application Insights tracing, Log Analytics queries, Azure Monitor dashboards and alerting — and use it to drive operational excellence.
- Define and enforce the testing strategy: unit, integration, contract, performance, and chaos/failure tests appropriate to a financially significant ETRM-adjacent system.
- Participate in production support, incident response, and post-incident reviews; close the loop back into design and standards.
Stakeholder and client engagement -
- Translate complex regulatory, market, and operational requirements (forecasting cadences, settlement rules, PPA/LTNPA obligations, demand-response participation, value-at-risk methodology) into pragmatic technical designs.
- Present the architecture confidently to client engineering, security, and audit teams — including in support of RFP responses, technical design documents, and SLA commitments.
REQUIREMENTS:
Core Engineering — Non-negotiable -
- 8+ Years of professional Software Engineering with at least the last 4 in a Senior, Architect, or Tech-Lead capacity on production cloud systems.
- Deep C# and .NET expertise: .NET Core / .NET 6+ (and ideally .NET 8/10), ASP.NET Core, EF Core, async/await fluency, performance tuning, and modern C# language features.
- .NET assembly loading and plugin architectures: real experience designing extensibility models using AssemblyLoadContext or equivalent, including isolation, versioning, and dependency management of dynamically loaded assemblies.
- Distributed systems design: service decomposition, idempotency, eventual consistency, retries and back-off, distributed transactions/sagas, and patterns for service-to-service communication and orchestration.
- Microservices on Kubernetes: production experience running C# workloads on AKS (or EKS/GKE), including Helm/Kustomize, ingress, autoscaling, network policies, and the Kubernetes API.
Azure platform -
- AKS in production: cluster design, node pools, workload identity / managed identities, secrets via Key Vault Provider for Secrets Store CSI driver.
- Azure SQL Database / Managed Instance, including sharded or horizontally partitioned designs, query tuning, and high-availability patterns.
- Azure Blob Storage and ADLS Gen 2 — lifecycle management, access tiers, security.
- Azure Cache for Redis — caching, distributed locks, pub/sub, and consistency patterns.
- Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) — OAuth2/OIDC, app registrations, roles and groups, B2B/B2C scenarios where relevant.
- Azure Key Vault, Application Insights, Log Analytics, and Azure Monitor — used together, not as isolated tools.
Data platform and analytics -
- Hands-on Databricks experience and the medallion (Bronze/Silver/Gold) lakehouse pattern on Delta Lake / ADLS Gen 2.
- Apache Spark for ETL/ELT — comfortable reasoning about partitioning, shuffles, and job performance even if a data engineer writes most of the notebooks.
- Working knowledge of MLflow and how production ML models are registered, versioned, deployed, and monitored — including low-latency inference served from Kubernetes.
- Practical SQL fluency for analytical and transactional workloads, and a clear point of view on where each belongs.
DevOps, security, and operations -
- GitHub Actions (or equivalent) for CI/CD into Azure Container Registry and AKS; experience with progressive delivery and rollback.
- Container security, image scanning, and secret management discipline.
- Structured logging with Serilog and a strong opinion on observability — traces, metrics, logs, and correlation across services.
- Threat modelling and secure-by-design thinking; comfort with the security review process for regulated or financially-material systems.
Frontend awareness -
- You will not own the React / Next.js Frontend day-to-day, but you must be able to design clean APIs for it, debug end-to-end issues, and hold a credible technical conversation with the frontend lead.
Highly desirable -
- Direct experience in complex systems, with legacy data sources, building future facing solutions.
- Integration experience with industrial meters, SCADA, MES, or ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics).
- Exposure to regulated reporting environments (financial, ESG, or compliance) and the discipline that comes with them.
- Client engagement, writing, or open-source contributions — anything that shows you can communicate as well as you build.
