Lead Associate – AI & .NET

About the role

The Lead Associate - AI / .NET is a senior technical authority within the engineering organisation, responsible for designing, developing, and delivering high‑quality software solutions that power Davies’ UK&I technology estate. The role provides hands‑on technical leadership across modern engineering practices, cloud‑native architectures, and Agile delivery environments, ensuring that engineering squads consistently deliver robust, scalable, secure, and maintainable software. Acting as a role model for engineering excellence, the Lead Associate mentors developers at all levels, promotes best practice, and drives continuous improvement in code quality, patterns, tooling, and development workflows. This position is ideal for a highly skilled, T‑shaped engineer with deep specialism in back‑end, front‑end, cloud, or DevOps and broad exposure to the Microsoft‑centric stack including .NET, C#, React/TypeScript, Azure, Terraform, and SQL Server.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of high‑quality, cloud‑native applications aligned to strategic technologies.
• Write clean, maintainable, secure code following SOLID principles, design patterns, and OWASP guidelines.
• Develop microservices, containerised applications, and event‑driven components.
• Implement automated testing approaches including TDD, integration testing, and CI/CD pipeline automation.
• Support SRE practices such as observability, resilience engineering, and performance tuning.

Required profile

• 8–10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in C# and .NET (or Python).
• Modern front‑end experience with React, Angular, or Vue.
• Advanced experience with Azure (or AWS/GCP equivalents).
• Strong expertise in microservices, event‑driven architecture, and Domain‑Driven Design.
• Strong SQL Server and Entity Framework capabilities.
• Test‑driven development and automated test practices.
• CI/CD pipelines and DevOps tooling.
• Secure coding practices and familiarity with OWASP principles.

Required skills

• C#
• .NET
• Python
• React
• Angular
• Vue
• Azure
• AWS
• GCP
• Terraform
• SQL Server
• Entity Framework
• Microservices
• Event‑driven architecture
• Domain‑Driven Design
• TDD
• CI/CD
• DevOps
• OWASP