Lead Developer

Location: Manchester/Hybrid working pattern (Occasional business-critical travel to Lytham)

If you’re ready to join forces with a team that’s as passionate about sustainability as it is about providing top-tier service, then read on.

Introduction
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.

Role Purpose
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 and Responsibilities

Architecture \& Migration

• 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

Personal skills and experience
Essential

• 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

If you’re ready to be part of a passionate, collaborative team that’s driving change in the energy sector, we’d love to hear from you.

Pay: £70,000.00-£75,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Company events
• Company pension
• Cycle to work scheme
• Flexitime
• Paid volunteer time
• Private medical insurance

Application question(s):

• Reliability commute to the office in Manchester with occasional business-critical travel to Lytham.

Work authorisation:

• United Kingdom (preferred)

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Manchester M2