Lead Backend/FullStack Engineer

You'll be leading one of our three product squads 6 a multi-skilled team usually consisting of Back End, Front-End, QA, UX Designers, Content Creators, and a Product Manager, supported by other leads and Staff Engineers.

When it comes to culture - we really try to build cohesive, high performing teams that pull together. Each squad feels a real sense of ownership over their work. Building an environment based on trust and honesty is really important to us, enabling squads and individuals to grow and develop.

As a lead backend engineer, your time will be split between coaching other backend developers within the team, steering our backend architecture and providing oversight on the back end tasks for our backlog items - delivering some independently and some through coaching others. As we work in multidisciplinary squads, ideally you will also be able to support others doing Front End, QA, DevOps (etc) work to make sure we hit our sprint goals.

Your new development will be done within a Microservices architecture, but you will also be contributing to our legacy systems while we are in the transition period. Our stack runs on Azure 6 including Front Door, App Services, Application Insights, and App Configuration 6 with SQL Server and Cosmos DB for data and Azure Service Bus for messaging between services.

Outside of squad work you will be part of the Back End Chapter. We hold Chapter meetings to talk about tech and ways of working. We work democratically to evolve our stack and make constant improvements.

What Skills Are You Bringing To The Team?

• Strong C# development experience
• Experience with both .NET Core and .NET Web API
• Experience of building Microservices in .NET Core
• Experience using Message Based Architectures
• Experience using both SQL & NoSQL technologies
• Experience of API design
• Cloud development/architecture (Azure)
• Experience working in an Agile environment (Scrum/Kanban)
• Knowledge and experience of Unit Testing (xUnit, nUnit)
• Familiarity with modern UI frameworks and tooling (React, React Native, npm)
• Experience integrating AI/LLM capabilities into back-end services (e.g. OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, or similar APIs)

Desired Skills/Experience

• Experience of TDD practices
• DevOps (CI/CD, Pipelines, Infrastructure-as-Code)
• Experience managing a team of developers
• Exposure to Agentic AI patterns (tool use, orchestration frameworks, MCP, or similar)
• Experience working with Azure DevOps build and release pipelines

Core Values

• An excellent communicator and relationship builder
• Confident in providing technical guidance and mentoring to mid-level and junior developers
• Enjoys bringing clarity to situations then helping others to take ownership
• Role-models curiosity, open-mindedness, honesty, and transparency
• Advocacy for great engineering practices around the Digital & Technology team
• Actively keeps up to date with modern tools, frameworks, and industry trends 6 and brings new thinking back to the team

You will be part of a Product focused Technical squad, where the squad is responsible for building, delivering and maintaining fantastic software. This means you will be involved in all stages of your lifecycle from the initial discovery, through planning, build, release and monitoring. You'll be part of all the usual Agile ceremonies and as a team, you will be delivering great new functionality over two-week sprints.

Leading the design, delivery and ongoing health of the backend services owned by your squad 6 from technical direction and architectural decisions through to hands-on coding, code review, and production support. You'll be accountable for the quality, performance, and security of what your squad ships, for coaching and growing the backend engineers around you, and for contributing to the wider backend architecture and standards through the Back End Chapter.