Cape Town: Technical Architect and Senior Back End Developer (C#, .Net 6+, ASP.NET Core, EF Core) (CPT Onsite) posted by DataFin Recruitment

About the Role

We are seeking a highly skilled Technical Architect and Senior Back End Developer to lead the technical design and development of our client’s core backend services in Cape Town. As a hands-on expert, you will be responsible for designing, building, and maintaining microservices, as well as leading architecture reviews, code reviews, and design sessions. You will also be expected to translate complex regulatory, market, and operational requirements into pragmatic technical designs.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end technical architecture of the platform across the application plane (AKS), the data and analytics plane (Databricks/Delta Lake), and the DevOps/observability plane.
• Maintain and evolve the architecture documentation, decision records (ADRs), and reference diagrams; make and defend trade-off decisions with the CTO and product leadership.
• Define the service decomposition strategy, inter-service contracts, and the rules of engagement for the custom Orchestration Layer that mediates communication between Kubernetes services.
• Set non-functional standards performance, scalability, resilience, security, observability and verify the system meets them.
• Lead architecture reviews, code reviews, and design sessions; mentor Mid-level and Junior Engineers and grow the teams depth in .NET, Azure, and distributed systems.
• Personally design, build, and maintain core Backend microservices in C# / .NET 10 (Ingestion, API, Auth, Orchestration) running in containers on AKS.
• Build out the Generic Data Ingestion Layer the abstraction, the standardised internal data models, and the plugin SDK that other engineers use to onboard new data sources.
• Implement and review C# plugin assemblies for specific energy-domain sources: industrial meters (mines and smelters), invoice ingestion, ERP/financial system integrations, MES, and SAWEM market gateway.
• Design schemas and access patterns for the sharded SQL Server estate, the Redis caching layer, and Blob/ADLS storage; own data-tier performance and consistency.
• Implement secure runtime configuration (Azure Key Vault via CSI), workload identity, and authentication/authorisation flows backed by Entra ID.
• Build the integration surface between the operational AKS plane and the Databricks data platform feeding Bronze, consuming Gold, and serving low-latency ML inference endpoints from AKS.
• Own the GitHub-based CI/CD pipelines into Azure Container Registry and AKS, including build, test, scan, and progressive deployment strategies.
• Embed observability from day one structured Serilog logging, Application Insights tracing, Log Analytics queries, Azure Monitor dashboards and alerting and use it to drive operational excellence.
• Define and enforce the testing strategy: unit, integration, contract, performance, and chaos/failure tests appropriate to a financially significant ETRM-adjacent system.
• Participate in production support, incident response, and post-incident reviews; close the loop back into design and standards.
• Translate complex regulatory, market, and operational requirements (forecasting cadences, settlement rules, PPA/LTNPA obligations, demand-response participation, value-at-risk methodology) into pragmatic technical designs.
• Present the architecture confidently to client engineering, security, and audit teams including in support of RFP responses, technical design documents, and SLA commitments.

Requirements

• 8+ Years of professional Software Engineering with at least the last 4 in a Senior, Architect, or Tech-Lead capacity on production cloud systems.
• Deep C# and .NET expertise: .NET Core / .NET 6+ (and ideally .NET 8/10), ASP.NET Core, EF Core, async/await fluency, performance tuning, and modern C# language features.
• .NET assembly loading and plugin architectures: real experience designing extensibility models using AssemblyLoadContext or equivalent, including isolation, versioning, and dependency management of dynamically loaded assemblies.
• Distributed systems design: service decomposition, idempotency, eventual consistency, retries and back-off, distributed transactions/sagas, and patterns for service-to-service communication and orchestration.
• Microservices on Kubernetes: production experience running C# workloads on AKS (or EKS/GKE), including Helm/Kustomize, ingress, autoscaling, network policies, and the Kubernetes API.

Qualifications

• Formal education/certifications not specified.