Lead Developer, Software Architect, DevOps

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.

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.

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

Write high-quality, production-ready C# across ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs, Blazor United (SSR and Web Assembly) 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 Dev Ops (or Git Hub 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 Open Telemetry 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.

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

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…