Evolve Energy (Evolve Energy Supply Limited)
Senior Lead Developer
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Job Title: Lead Developer
Salary: £70k - £75k
Location: Manchester/Hybrid working pattern (Occasional business-critical travel to Lytham)
If you’re ready to join forces with a team that’s as passionate about sustainability as it is about providing top-tier service, then read on.
Introduction
Evolve Energy is a rapidly scaling business in an exciting phase of engineering transformation. We are currently undertaking a strategic digital transformation, with the express need to improve capacity and throughput across all areas of the business and grow to 1bn+ revenue over the next five years. With a small but skilled development team, we are mid-way through our journey from a mature monolithic system to a modern, services-based architecture on the Microsoft Azure stack.
Role Purpose
We are looking for a Lead Developer to own and drive this migration — someone who can architect with confidence, write excellent C# code, champion engineering best practices, and build a high-performing engineering team through technical leadership, mentoring, and modern software engineering practices. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with real technical leadership: you will mentor senior and mid-level developers, set standards, and shape the engineering culture of the team. You will report directly to senior leadership and have a meaningful voice in technology decisions. This is an opportunity to make a lasting architectural impact at a company where engineers are valued and trusted. As this is a genuine leadership role, there will be opportunity to grow into a Head of Engineering role as the organisation scales.
Duties and Responsibilities
Architecture & Migration
- Lead the technical strategy for migrating the existing monolithic .NET application to a microservices architecture on Azure.
- Apply appropriate architectural patterns to enable incremental migration whilst maintaining the stability, performance, and integrity of the existing platform.
- Design services using Domain-Driven Design (DDD), CQRS, and Event Sourcing, including service boundaries, data ownership, and communication patterns across REST and Azure Service Bus.
- Consider.NET Aspire for local development orchestration and service discovery, reducing environment setup friction for the team.
- Make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance modern greenfield patterns with the realities of an early-stage migration.
Technical Delivery
- Write high-quality, production-ready C# across ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs, Blazor United (SSR and WebAssembly), and internal gRPC services.
- Build and maintain Azure-native infrastructure: AKS, Azure Functions v4, Service Bus, Azure SQL, Azure Cache for Redis, Key Vault.
- Design and evolve CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps (or GitHub Actions), including build, test, container image scanning, and blue-green deployment automation.
- Own infrastructure-as-code using Bicep or Terraform, and embed observability from day one using OpenTelemetry alongside Application Insights.
- Champion test-driven development, including meaningful unit testing with xUnit, integration testing with Playwright, and consumer-driven contract testing between services, for example, using Pact.
- Ensure security is embedded into engineering practices, including SAST scanning, dependency updates, and OWASP-aligned API design via Azure API Management.
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Technical Leadership & Mentoring
- Lead, mentor, and develop a small engineering squad through structured code reviews, pair programming, technical coaching, and architectural working sessions.
- Define and document coding standards, design patterns, ADRs (Architecture Decision Records), and engineering workflows.
- Lead technical planning sessions and break down complex migration work into clear deliverables.
- Foster a culture of continuous improvement — blameless post-mortems, knowledge sharing sessions, and regular retrospectives.
- Act as a bridge between business requirements and technical solutions.
- Establish engineering metrics and quality standards, driving continual improvement across code quality, delivery performance, and platform reliability.
Agile Delivery & Scrum Leadership
- Act as Scrum Master for the engineering squad, facilitating Sprint Planning, Daily Scrums, Sprint Reviews, and Retrospectives.
- Own the health of the delivery process, continually improving team flow, predictability, and throughput using agile metrics where appropriate.
- Work closely with Product Owners and stakeholders to refine requirements, manage priorities, and remove delivery impediments.
- Coach the team in agile principles, helping establish a culture of continuous improvement and iterative delivery.
- Balance technical debt, platform investment, and feature delivery to maximize long-term business value.
- Ensure engineering work is broken into well-defined, deliverable increments with clear acceptance criteria.
AI-Enabled Software Engineering
- Champion the adoption of AI-assisted software engineering practices across the development team.
- Use modern agentic AI development tools (for example, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or equivalent) to accelerate software delivery whilst maintaining engineering quality.
- Develop effective prompting, workflow orchestration, and human-in-the-loop review processes to improve developer productivity.
- Establish engineering standards for the safe, secure, and responsible use of AI-generated code.
- Identify opportunities to automate testing, documentation, code reviews, refactoring, and repetitive engineering tasks using AI agents.
- Evaluate emerging AI engineering tools and recommend pragmatic adoption where they deliver measurable business value.
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Personal Skills and Experience
Essential
- Ability to articulate technical trade-offs and make pragmatic engineering decisions.
- Strong, demonstrable C# experience on.NET 9 or later, with the ability to produce idiomatic, clean, and tested code.
- Proven experience designing microservices or services-based architectures in production.
- Solid understanding of DDD, CQRS, and Event Sourcing.
- Hands-on experience with Azure-native services: AKS, Service Bus, Azure Functions, Azure SQL.
- Experience building or significantly improving CI/CD pipelines, preferably in Azure DevOps.
- Familiarity with Blazor (Server or WebAssembly) or demonstrable enthusiasm to move into it.
- Experience mentoring developers and conducting thorough, constructive code reviews.
- Strong grasp of SOLID principles, clean architecture, and test-driven development.
- Experience using AI-assisted software engineering tools (such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Cursor) to improve engineering productivity whilst maintaining quality.
- Experience working within Scrum or other Agile delivery frameworks.
Highly Desirable
- Experience leading or contributing to a monolith-to-microservices migration.
- Firsthand experience with .NET Aspire for local multi-service orchestration.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code: Bicep (preferred) or Terraform.
- Knowledge of OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and structured logging at scale.
- Experience with Azure API Gateways — versioning, rate limiting, developer portals.
- Understanding of event-driven architecture patterns: sagas, outbox pattern, idempotent consumers.
- Azure certifications, such as AZ-305 Solutions Architect, would be advantageous but are not essential.
The Ideal Candidate
- You will be genuinely excited by architectural challenges, you enjoy thinking through distributed systems.
- You enjoy taking ownership: you define the right approach and see it through without waiting for direction.
- You will have excellent communication skills and communicate clearly and empathetically with your team, the business, and in documentation.
- You will balance perfectionism with pragmatism; you know when to do things properly and when to ship.
- You enjoy watching and encouraging your team to succeed, you measure success by what the whole team achieves.
- You will write ADRs naturally, not as a box-ticking exercise but because you find them useful.
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