Software Development Lead

Substantial experience delivering production software, including demonstrable technical leadership within a multidisciplinary engineering team.

Experience owning complex technical decisions from requirements and design through implementation, deployment, and live operation.

Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, coach engineers, resolve technical disagreements constructively, and create clarity in complex or ambiguous delivery environments.

Strong software-design fundamentals, including secure coding, maintainability, automated testing, observability, performance, scalability, and operational resilience.

Ability to make and communicate proportionate architectural decisions and establish practical engineering standards.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical decisions, risks, and trade-offs to engineers, delivery colleagues, senior leaders, clients, and other stakeholders.

Experience working in iterative product-delivery environments and adapting engineering practices to improve flow, feedback, quality, and predictability.

Experience supporting production services, including incident response, root-cause analysis, monitoring, service improvement, and technical-debt management.

Deep knowledge of C#, ASP.NET Core, and the Microsoft .NET ecosystem.

Strong experience designing and delivering secure REST APIs, background services, integrations, and distributed systems.

Understanding of microservices, event-driven architecture, messaging, asynchronous processing, and appropriate service-boundary design.

Experience with relational data, SQL Server, Entity Framework Core, transaction management, data modelling, and integration patterns.

Experience designing cloud-native services for Microsoft Azure, including appropriate use of compute, storage, messaging, identity, configuration, networking, and managed data services.

Strong understanding of authentication, authorisation, secure API design, secrets management, dependency management, and common application-security risks.

Experience with automated unit, integration, contract, component, and performance testing.

Experience implementing structured logging, metrics, tracing, health checks, monitoring, and practical operational diagnostics.

Ability to provide technical leadership for back-end architecture, integration design, data concerns, service reliability, and performance.

Experience with modern React and TypeScript development.

Understanding of component and application architecture, state and data management, routing, forms, API integration, and reusable design patterns.

Experience creating accessible and responsive user interfaces that meet appropriate usability and accessibility standards.

Experience with automated front-end testing, including unit, component, integration, and end-to-end testing.

Understanding of browser security, authentication flows, dependency management, performance optimisation, error handling, logging, and client-side observability.

Familiarity with modern front-end build, package-management, linting, formatting, code-quality, and delivery tooling.

For Full Stack candidates, the ability to contribute to front-end architecture, engineering standards, design-system adoption, and user-experience implementation.

Working knowledge of CI/CD concepts and the ability to collaborate effectively on the design, maintenance, and troubleshooting of delivery pipelines.

Familiarity with GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines, including pull-request validation, builds, automated tests, security checks, packaging, releases, and deployments.

Understanding of YAML-based pipelines, reusable workflows and templates, pipeline artefacts, environments, approvals, quality gates, branching controls, and release strategies.

Experience contributing to the deployment and operation of applications and supporting services on Microsoft Azure.

Awareness of Azure identity and access management, service connections, secrets management, monitoring, networking, security, resilience, scalability, and cost considerations.

Working knowledge of Terraform and infrastructure-as-code principles sufficient to understand, review, and contribute to application-related infrastructure changes.

Understanding of Terraform modules, variables, outputs, state, plan and apply workflows, validation, and infrastructure-change review, with specialist guidance available from the Platform team.

Ability to work with the Architecture and Platform teams to integrate application changes, automated tests, static analysis, dependency checks, security scanning, and policy controls into delivery pipelines.

Ability to diagnose application-related build and deployment issues, engage the appropriate specialists, and contribute to improvements in pipeline reliability, speed, security, and developer usability.

Sound judgement about when a decision can be handled within the squad and when support or approval is required from the Architecture or Platform team.