C# / .NET Lead Engineer

About the role 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. You will: 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, background workers. Build services in C# / ASP.NET Core (REST/gRPC), use .NET Aspire and Dapr building blocks where appropriate; use EF Core for data access; guide healthy API contracts (OpenAPI/Swagger). Engineer robust data layers: deep SQL Server expertise (query tuning, indexing, isolation levels, deadlocks), Dapper and/or EF Core, and pragmatic use of NoSQL (Cosmos DB/MongoDB), caching (Redis), 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, 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. You are one among us if you… Love building enterprise-grade software that delivers real business outcomes, quickly. Move fast, communicate crisply, and mentor engineers through change. Thrive in ambiguity and enjoy owning complex technical challenges end-to-end. Bring energy, candor, and a bias for data-driven decisions. Energize teams: mentor, give/receive constructive feedback, and foster open, high-trust collaboration. Are comfortable working with remote/hybrid teams and customers across time zones. Learn fast and stay current with evolving .NET, cloud, and frontend ecosystems. Must-have qualifications: 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, stabilizing, and planning upgrades). Familiarity with .NET Upgrade Assistant, code analyzers, 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. Cloud-native design on Azure and/or AWS, including: Containers (Docker, Kubernetes/AKS/EKS), networking, secrets, cost/perf trade-offs. Compute (AKS/EKS, App Service, Functions/Lambda), 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) Experience with .NET Aspire (AppHost/ServiceDefaults, components, dashboard) and Dapr (service invocation, pub/sub, state, 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, resiliency patterns. Frontend leadership exposure with TypeScript + React (routing, state management, testing, performance). Testing culture: xUnit/NUnit, mocking, contract testing (e.g., Pact), API/integration tests, Playwright/Cypress/Jest where relevant; CI quality gates. Excellent communication and stakeholder management. 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, Ollama/llama.cpp; familiarity with LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or other agentic SDKs; RAG patterns and vector stores (Azure AI Search Pinecone, Redis Stack, pgvector). Frontend depth with Next.js, Vite, performance budgets, accessibility. Security & compliance: OWASP ASVS/Top10, secrets management, threat modeling. Experience with feature flags, A/B testing, and product analytics. Domain-Driven Design, Clean Architecture, and migration strategies from legacy .NET Framework to modern .NET. We are technology agnostic in our approach. Having said that, here are the technologies we are currently working with and looking for in this role; 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 & X-Ray Security: OAuth2/OIDC, Azure AD/Entra, Key Vault/Secrets Manager