Backend Developer (.NET)

About the Company Hargrove Management Services Organization ("Hargrove MSO"), formerly NetLaw (netlaw.com) is the technology platform behind Hargrove Firm LLP's online estate planning practice, delivered to clients across the United States through financial advisors. Estate planning remains one of the last major areas of legal work still handled largely by hand, and we are building the platform that changes that. We are hiring multiple backend developers. The work We build most of our system in-house rather than assembling it from third-party libraries — the data layer, the analytics, the frontend components that present them. The domain is unusually demanding. Estate planning rules differ in every state, the documents we generate carry legal weight, and the platform sits between a law firm, financial advisory firms, and a range of external data and service providers. Requirements arrive as legal and business rules rather than as specifications, and part of the work is turning them into something a system can express correctly. There is a great deal of work ahead: new services, new features across existing ones, and new partner and provider integrations arriving regularly. Most of what you build will be built from scratch, and it will stay in the product. The first call goes both ways — we will go into specifics about the work, and we want to understand how you work. The stack is .NET 8+/C#, SQL Server, EF Core, Azure (App Services, Container Apps, Application Gateway), and event-driven messaging over MQTT and Azure Event Hubs. Microservices, minimal APIs, webhooks, WebSockets, and some JavaScript where the work extends into the frontend. What we are looking for Someone with taste in code. The developer we want is the one who looks at five hundred lines handling a problem and recognizes that fifty will handle it better — covering every case the longer version covered, while remaining far easier to read six months later. Not brevity for its own sake, but the ability to find the structure that makes most of the code unnecessary. That instinct is what we screen for, because it cannot be taught quickly and it determines what the codebase looks like in two years. Specifically: strong C# and .NET, substantive Entity Framework Core experience (relationships, query performance, recognizing an N+1 before it reaches production), confident SQL Server skills, and practical experience with event-driven communication between services. Azure experience is an advantage; the rest we can teach. A degree in computer science is welcome but not required. We are interested in what you can do and how you think about it. Working with us You would join our backend team in Croatia, working closely with our CTO, our frontend lead, and the rest of engineering. We review each other's code, we discuss decisions before committing to them, and we expect people to raise objections when they see a problem. Our standard for how code is written is high, and review here concerns itself as much with how something is expressed as with whether it works. Most people find that an adjustment, because writing genuinely clean code requires knowing more, not less — you cannot simplify something you only partly understand. Some adapt to it quickly and others take longer. It is the part of the job we are least willing to compromise on, and it is worth knowing that before you apply. Hiring process Three steps: an introductory call, a short take-home exercise of two to three hours that we then review together, and a technical session in which you read existing code and discuss how you would improve it. The technical session is conducted without AI assistance. We use these tools daily and have no objection to them; we simply need to understand how you reason when the tool is wrong. We begin with a paid ninety-day period so that both sides can be confident in the fit. Compensation is discussed in the first conversation.