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.
