Senior Software Engineer

Overview

Step into a role where your expertise drives innovation — and your leadership grows the next generation of engineers. We’re looking to recruit a Senior Software Engineer into our Technology team in Newcastle.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will take a leading role in the development and maintenance of a range of applications and services across the North Standard technology domain. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver robust, scalable, and secure solutions that support the needs of our insurance business. You will mentor and manage junior software engineers so they can contribute to the team deliverables effectively.

Key responsibilities

• Align technical strategy with product and business goals:
  Ensure that engineering efforts support the overall product roadmap and business strategy, providing input on prioritization and resource planning.
• Legacy Modernisation:
  Use a range of techniques to modernise, untangle and consolidate legacy platforms incrementally.
• Collaborate on solutions to problems:
  Work closely with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to define technical specifications, architecture, and design that align with product goals and user needs.
• Talk to Users and Stakeholders:
  Engage with users and stakeholders regularly to encourage and embed a positive feedback loop. Effectively communicate decisions, status, and risks to non-technical stakeholders, ensuring transparency and alignment across teams.
• Identify and mitigate technical risks:
  Proactively identify potential risks, including scalability, security, and compliance concerns, and develop mitigation strategies to ensure long-term reliability and stability.
• Architect scalable and secure solutions:
  Design and develop high-performance, cloud-based applications using predominantly .NET and Microsoft Azure technologies, ensuring scalability, security, and reliability across the stack.
• Technical leadership:
  Provide technical leadership and hands-on guidance, supporting engineers in your product team. The product team is designed to be cross-functional and self-organising.
• Own and optimize the deployment lifecycle:
  Lead the entire deployment process, ensuring high-quality, reliable releases by developing and maintaining robust and automated CI/CD pipelines. Make a shift towards small frequent releases.
• Solve complex technical challenges and manage major incidents:
  Troubleshoot and resolve complex technical challenges swiftly, whether during development or in response to major incidents.
• Drive continuous improvement and foster a collaborative culture:
  Promote a culture of innovation, continuous improvement within the team, identifying opportunities to enhance processes, reduce technical debt, and adopt emerging technologies.
• Enforce high engineering standards:
  Ensure all development adheres to industry best practices, security protocols, and regulatory requirements including by conducting thorough code reviews focused on maintainability, performance optimization, and high-quality standards across the codebase.

Skills/Qualifications/Experience

• Expert-level .NET development skills (C#, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, LINQ) with strong knowledge of application architecture, design patterns, and clean coding practices.
• Proficiency in cloud-native development on Microsoft Azure, including Azure App Services, Functions, Storage, SQL Server, Key Vault, monitoring, and identity.
• Strong CI/CD experience using Azure Dev Ops, including pipeline creation using YAML, release management, automated build/test processes, and environment configuration.
• Good understanding of API design and integration, including RESTful APIs, microservices, messaging/queues such as Service Bus, and secure communication patterns.
• Testing expertise, covering automated unit/integration testing frameworks e.g. NUnit, mocking, test pipelines, and quality-driven development approaches.
• Experience of containerisation and infrastructure-as-code, especially Docker, Azure Container Apps/Kubernetes (AKS), and IaC tools such as Terraform.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to troubleshoot technical…