Senior Software Developer

Senior Developer Own the outcome. Build with confidence. Help others become stronger engineers. SALARY £60k - £70k LOCATION Manchester/Lytham St Annes WORKING PATTERN Hybrid The opportunity Evolve Energy is a rapidly scaling business in an exciting phase of engineering transformation. We are modernising mature platforms, developing new cloud services and increasing the capacity, reliability and speed of delivery needed to support business growth. We are looking for a hands-on Senior Developer who can take ownership of outcomes across complex changes, not simply complete assigned development tasks. You will combine strong software engineering with sound design judgement, operational ownership, business understanding and practical support for the engineers around you. What success looks like Cross-system changes are delivered safely and work well in production. Quality and operational risks are visible. Technical decisions are proportionate and connected to business outcomes. Less experienced engineers grow in confidence and independence. Role purpose Own the technical delivery and operational outcome of significant changes across services and system boundaries. You will remain hands-on in the code while shaping solutions, coordinating dependencies, managing technical risk and ensuring changes transition successfully into production support. You will work closely with developers, quality engineers, business analysts, product colleagues and business stakeholders. You will challenge requirements constructively, explain technical trade-offs clearly and help the team improve its engineering practice through reviews, pairing, coaching and shared learning. What you will do Build it well · Establish and reinforce quality expectations within your team, applying TDD, BDD and appropriate automated testing practices · Use testing to improve software design, maintainability and confidence in change, balancing delivery speed with supportability · Design and deliver complex solutions across services and system boundaries within agreed architectural principles and cloud adoption standards · Evaluate and explain trade-offs across performance, security, maintainability, cost, risk and delivery speed · Use code reviews, pairing and clear feedback to improve engineering practice across the team · Use quality, defect, technical debt and operational evidence to prioritise improvements within owned areas Deliver effectively · Take ownership of delivery and operational outcomes, coordinating work across multiple systems or components · Identify technical dependencies, delivery risks and blockers early, then work with the team to maintain momentum · Improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment practices and release confidence within the areas you own · Use trunk-based development, short-lived branches and feature flags to support frequent, low-risk change and controlled rollback · Improve observability through meaningful metrics, logs, traces and alerting, using telemetry to understand service behaviour and customer impact · Drive root-cause analysis after incidents and turn production learning into improvements in design, testing, deployment and support Use AI responsibly to improve engineering · Use AI-assisted development, testing, analysis and documentation techniques where they improve delivery outcomes · Critically evaluate AI-generated outputs to protect quality, security and maintainability, retaining appropriate human review · Identify practical opportunities for AI to reduce repetitive effort, improve troubleshooting or increase useful test coverage · Share effective usage patterns and lessons learned so the wider team can adopt AI responsibly. Solve the right problems · Understand customer, operational, commercial and financial drivers, and connect technical choices to measurable outcomes · Challenge requirements and assumptions constructively, shaping solutions around business value rather than technical preference · Contribute technical insight to product and prioritisation decisions, identifying opportunities to reduce cost, risk, effort or customer friction · Establish meaningful performance baselines for significant changes and use telemetry to identify bottlenecks, capacity constraints and scaling risks · Design services that are observable, supportable and resilient, with expected business growth considered from the outset Grow capability · Provide technical leadership within your delivery area, helping the team align around clear and proportionate technical decisions · Coach less experienced engineers through pairing, reviews, actionable feedback and stretch opportunities · Reduce key-person dependency through useful documentation, knowledge transfer and shared ownership across services · Evaluate and trial new technologies, tools and practices where value can be demonstrated, making recommendations based on evidence · Introduce practical automation, tooling and engineering improvements, then help the team sustain successful changes Your technical background We are more interested in evidence of sound judgement and outcomes than a checklist of technologies. You should nevertheless bring strong, current engineering experience in most of the following areas: · Strong commercial C# and modern .NET experience, with the ability to produce clean, idiomatic and well-tested production code · Hands-on experience designing and delivering services-based or distributed solutions across system boundaries · Microsoft Azure experience, ideally including Azure SQL, Service Bus, Functions, Key Vault, container platforms and monitoring services · CI/CD experience using Azure DevOps or equivalent, including automated build, test and deployment controls · Strong knowledge of TDD, automated testing, secure engineering, observability and operational support · Experience with APIs, event-driven integration, SQL Server and Entity Framework Core · Web development experience using ASP.NET Core and modern HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Blazor experience would be useful · Practical use of AI-assisted engineering tools while maintaining security, quality and human accountability Senior-level experience · Evidence of owning outcomes for significant or cross-system changes from refinement through release and production support · Ability to make sound design decisions, document trade-offs and make risks and assumptions clear to engineers and stakeholders · A track record of improving quality, delivery flow, reliability, observability or operational performance within owned areas · Experience coaching developers, with examples of helping others become more capable and independent · Confidence working with product and business colleagues to shape requirements and translate needs into sustainable technical outcomes · A pragmatic approach that protects quality without introducing unnecessary complexity or process Highly desirable · Experience modernising mature or monolithic applications through incremental change · Experience with .NET Aspire, Docker or other container technologies, Bicep or Terraform, and OpenTelemetry or distributed tracing · Knowledge of feature-flag frameworks, progressive delivery and controlled rollback strategies · Experience improving application performance, capacity management or service reliability for business-critical systems · Experience in utilities, CRM platforms or other operationally complex environments · Relevant Microsoft Azure certification, although practical evidence matters more than certification alone The person we are looking for · You are a hands-on engineer who takes responsibility for the outcome, not only the implementation · You start with the business or customer need and choose technology proportionately · You communicate clearly, make trade-offs understandable and raise risks early · You use evidence from delivery and production to improve decisions and engineering practice · You enjoy helping other engineers grow and willingly share knowledge rather than becoming a single point of dependency · You combine ambition with pragmatism, raising standards without creating unnecessary complexity Why join Evolve Energy? You will have meaningful ownership of important technical outcomes and the opportunity to influence how we design, build and operate software during a significant period of change. This is a genuinely hands-on senior role with scope to improve platforms, engineering practice and the capability of the team around you. How to apply Please share your CV together with a short summary of a technical change, engineering improvement or mentoring outcome that best demonstrates how you took ownership beyond the code itself. NO AGENCIES PLEASE.