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Umbraco Specialist — Migration & Upgrade (Umbraco 13 → 17 LTS)
Location: Remote, with working-hours overlap with the UK
Engagement: Contract, project-based — fixed scope with expected follow-on phases
Seniority: Senior / Lead
Start: 05 August 2026
Delivery deadline: 14 August 2026
Reports to: Tech Lead + Single point of contact at the client's delivery team
About Rad Hires
Rad Hires is a recruiting company that connects senior engineering talent with agencies and product teams internationally. We work closely with our clients, so we know the projects and the teams behind them — and we tell candidates the truth about both.
About the company
Our client is a global design and technology company that delivers digital work for brands across Europe and the US.
They are currently running a multi-phase digital transformation program for one of their own clients — a UK fostering agency group — and are bringing in specialist Umbraco delivery capacity for the first package of that program.
The work is delivered white label under their name: you work to them, not to the end client.
About the role
You'll own a tight, high-stakes package: take a live five-brand Umbraco multi-site installation off its incumbent host, upgrade it to Umbraco 17 LTS, and stand it up on new hosting that the agency will operate afterwards.
Start to finish in roughly ten days, with a live enquiry pipeline running throughout.
The current version is unconfirmed but earlier than 14, so the audit is day-one work and everything else depends on it. There's no server access on the incumbent host — you'll work from back-office access plus a copy of the deployed application and database.
This is not a greenfield build. It's a migration with real consequences: the incumbent host deletes all data at termination (including backups), five brands share one database so they upgrade together, and form submissions fire webhooks into a live automation layer that must keep working. Near-zero tolerance for enquiry downtime.
If this package goes well, a build phase follows with the same partner: rebuilding the component library against new design and brand tooling, consolidating two further WordPress brand sites into the installation, and bilingual content. Ongoing hosting and maintenance may also be subcontracted.
What you'll do
Audit (first deliverable, day one)
- Establish the exact Umbraco version, installed packages, custom back-office extensions and content-model usage.
- Confirm the upgrade path and produce an effort estimate.
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Upgrade
- Take the shared installation to Umbraco 17 LTS — all five brands together, one shared database.
- Handle the move of Umbraco Forms to per-domain subscription licensing at 17 (procurement is coordinated by the agency).
Migrate
- Move off the incumbent host's managed dedicated servers onto agency-owned hosting.
- Recommend the target platform with a written rationale — Umbraco Cloud or an AWS/Azure/GCP/Cloudflare-class platform. It has to suit a managed service run by the agency after handover.
- Carry across and verify against the live estate: form definitions and entries, members, redirects, and any custom data.
- Keep forms, webhooks, tracking, analytics and embedded third-party assets (booking widgets, tracking scripts, consent banners, server-side tag loaders) working unchanged. A separate workstream owns the automation layer — no re-pointing or replacement here.
Configure
- Development, Staging and Production environments, with backups and a tested restore.
- Individual documented user accounts and roles, plus an access register.
- Back-office restriction per brand: each team sees and edits only its own sites.
- Content-node naming cleanup across the tree.
- Welsh and English language-variant capability enabled at platform level (bilingual content itself is a later phase).
- Preserve the existing accessibility posture (WCAG 2.2 AA) and cookie-consent setup unchanged.
Cutover and handover
- Dual-running and a per-site rollback plan at cutover.
- Respect the sequence: stand up, migrate in full, verify against the live estate — only then is notice served on the incumbent. Never terminate before migration is verified.
- Clean, documented handover from build to run.
What we look for
- Demonstrable Umbraco 13 → 17 migrations you've delivered — with references we can contact.
- Multi-site Umbraco experience: shared installations, one database serving several brands, per-brand back-office permissions.
- Strong.NET / C# and hands-on experience with the Umbraco 14+ back-office, including migrating custom back-office extensions across the rewrite.
- Umbraco Forms migration experience, including entries and per-domain licensing at 17.
- Hosting and infrastructure judgement: Umbraco Cloud and/or Azure, AWS, GCP, Cloudflare — able to recommend a target and defend the choice for a team that will operate it, not just build it.
- Environment and release discipline: Dev/Staging/Prod, CI/CD, backups with verified restores.
- Cutover experience on live, revenue-or-enquiry-critical sites: dual-running, per-site rollback, verification against a live estate.
- A risk-register mindset — you can write down what could go wrong on a live multi-brand shared installation and what you'd do about it, before you touch anything.
- Documentation as a deliverable, not an afterthought.
- Strong written and spoken English, and comfort working white-label under someone else's name.
- Availability to start 05 August 2026 and complete by 14 August 2026.
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Nice to have
- Component-library development and rebuilding front-end components against a new design system.
- WordPress-to-Umbraco consolidation experience (relevant to the follow-on phase).
- Multilingual / language-variant Umbraco setups, particularly bilingual estates.
- WCAG 2.2 AA experience.
- Ongoing managed-hosting and maintenance experience.
Signals we love
- You ask what version it actually is instead of assuming, and you plan the audit before the upgrade.
- You raise blockers the day you find them, not in the weekly update.
- You sequence around the irreversible step — you know which move can't be undone and you protect it.
- You leave behind an access register, a rollback plan and a runbook someone else can operate.
- One point of contact, clear update calls at each phase, no chasing required.
This role is not for you if:
- Your Umbraco experience is mostly greenfield builds rather than upgrades of live estates.
- You'd rather replace the forms, webhooks and tracking stack than carry it over unchanged.
- You need the end client on the call — this is delivered white-label, through the agency.
- A ten-day window with a hard delivery date on a live enquiry pipeline doesn't sound workable to you.
Logistics
Engagement: Contract, project based. Package runs 05–14 August 2026, with a follow-on build phase expected (brief issued around mid-August) and possible ongoing hosting and maintenance work.
Location: Remote. Overlap with UK working hours required for phase update calls.
Language: English.
Working arrangement: White label under the agency's name. You work to the agency, not to the end client. Single point of contact expected on your side, with progress/next-step calls at each of the Audit, Upgrade, Migrate and Configure stages.
Confidentiality: Client identity, incumbent contracts and audit findings are released under NDA.
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