.NET Backend Lead Engineer

This role is offered on a Italian employment contract. Candidates must be based in Italy as we are unable to support remote working from outside the country due to local employment and tax legislation.

This is a team-lead role within Deltatre's .NET backend engineering organisation, supporting the platforms that power OTT streaming, live broadcast, and digital products for major sports rights owners and media companies.

You will lead a cross-functional engineering team — combining technical authority over the work the team produces with direct accountability for how the team operates: delivery quality, performance, professional development, and the standards the team holds itself to. You will still write code where it matters and lead architectural decisions, but your central job is making the team effective at what it ships.

Unlike the Principal track at Deltatre, this is a people-leading role. You will have direct reports, run performance conversations, and be accountable for how the team's work integrates with the wider engineering organisation.

• Lead a cross-functional engineering team building backend services for cloud-based media platforms — owning delivery, quality, and the team's technical direction
• Lead architectural decisions for the team's portfolio, ensuring scalability, performance, and long-term maintainability
• Set and enforce engineering standards within the team and align with the wider .NET engineering organisation
• Lead engineers through one-to-ones, performance conversations, and career development — building capability over time
• Collaborate closely with engineering peers, product leadership, and client teams to translate roadmap into delivery
• Oversee production incident response for the team's services, leading post-mortems and the improvements that follow
• Manage technical debt deliberately — when to take it on, when to pay it down
• Contribute hands‑on to the most complex or highest‑leverage work the team owns

You lead the work, and you lead the people doing the work. You are honest with your team about what is going well and what is not, and they are better engineers for having worked for you. You are credible technically because you still ship — but you spend your time deliberately, on the things only you can do.

• Substantial production experience with .NET (6+), C#, ASP.NET Core
• Demonstrated experience leading a cross-functional engineering team, including direct line management
• Solid architectural judgement — making and defending design decisions on real systems
• Experience with distributed systems — microservices, event-driven design (Rabbit
  
  MQ or equivalent)
• Production experience with at least one major cloud platform (Azure, AWS) and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Solid data persistence experience — MS SQL Server, Mongo
  
  DB, Redis, EF Core or NHibernate
• Experience leading or contributing to engineering performance and career development conversations
• Comfortable as the technical face of the team in client and senior stakeholder conversations
• Background in media streaming systems — HLS, MPEG-DASH, DRM, video workflow orchestration
• Experience setting up or improving CI/CD pipelines
• TDD discipline and a serious testing culture
• Experience supporting engineers from junior through senior progression

This role asks you to operate in two directions wards: you are the technical voice of the team to product, to engineering leadership, and sometimes to clients — you absorb ambiguity from above so your engineers can do their work. Inwards: you are responsible for the team being a good place to be an engineer, which means making honest assessments, having the conversations other people avoid, and protecting the team's time and focus.

People who thrive in this role tend to be technical enough that engineers trust their judgement, human enough that they do not reduce people to tickets, and disciplined enough to spend their time on what only they can do.

• Introductory conversation: this is a step for us to get to know each other better, and for us to answer all questions you might have around Deltatre.
• Take-Home…