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), 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.
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, stabilizing, and planning upgrades).
- Familiarity with. NET Upgrade Assistant, code analyzers, multi-targeting, and compatibility shims are 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, 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.
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).
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, and accessibility.
- Security and 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.
Role
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, and X-Ray.
- Security: OAuth2/OIDC, Azure AD/Entra, Key Vault/Secrets Manager.
This job was posted by Sushanth Jain from Kickdrum.
