Location: Manchester/Hybrid working pattern (Occasional business-critical travel to Lytham)
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.
RolePurpose:
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 & Responsibilities:
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.
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 maximise 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
Personalskills and experience:
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
What’s in it for You:
We want to give you more than a job, we want to give you a purpose and a career.
Evolve Energy offer a range of benefits such as:
- An amazing team with a community feel
- Opportunities to grow and develop your career
- Regular recognition and reward programs
- Free refreshments and breakfast
- Cycle to work and EV scheme
- Private Healthcare, cash health plans and annual fitness membership contribution
- Company sick pay and employee discount schemes
- EAP – health assistance and mental health first aiders
- Company pension and enhanced annual leave
- Volunteering days and social events
This position offers the right salary for the right person and the opportunity for you to take an exciting step forward in your career!
*Qualifying criteriaRoles may be subject to DBS and Financial checks. Any offer made will be conditional until checks are completed to a satisfactory standard.
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