Development Manager

We are looking for a hands‑on Development Manager to lead our Platform team. This role combines technical leadership with people leadership. You will manage, grow, and mentor a team of strong backend and platform engineers, while remaining deeply involved in architecture, design, and critical hands‑on development.

You will be responsible for building and continuously improving a high‑performing team, modernising our platform architecture, and ensuring the platform is scalable, reliable, and fit for long‑term growth. This is a leadership role for someone who enjoys coding, designing systems, and developing people equally.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Lead the design and evolution of our core platform and data infrastructure.
• Drive the transition to an event‑driven, cloud‑native architecture using Kafka and microservices.
• Stay hands‑on with code, architecture decisions, and critical technical challenges.
• Ensure high standards of system reliability, scalability, performance, and security.
• Review designs and code, set engineering best practices, and raise the technical bar across the team.

Team Leadership & Growth

• Build, lead, and mentor a team of platform and backend engineers.
• Create a strong engineering culture focused on ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Coach team members through regular feedback, career development, and technical mentorship.
• Participate in hiring, onboarding, and shaping the future structure of the team.

Delivery & Execution

• Own planning and execution for platform initiatives in close collaboration with Product, DevOps, Architecture and Business
• Balance short‑term delivery with long‑term platform health and technical debt reduction.
• Ensure predictable delivery while maintaining flexibility in a fast‑moving environment.

Collaboration

• Work closely with Product Managers to translate business and product needs into robust platform capabilities.
• Partner with DevOps on cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and operational excellence.
• Support other engineering teams by providing stable, scalable platform services and APIs.

Qualifications

Experience

• 8+ years of backend or platform engineering experience, with at least 2–3 years in a technical leadership or management role.
• Proven experience leading and growing engineering teams.
• Strong hands‑on background with .NET Core and C# in production environments.
• Experience designing and operating distributed, event‑driven systems.
• Practical experience with messaging and streaming platforms such as Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Experience working with cloud environments, preferably AWS.
• Experience with containerised environments using Docker and Kubernetes.

Technical Skills

• This is a hands-on position. Your role is to act as a technical lead as well
• Deep understanding of microservices architecture, distributed systems, and asynchronous processing.
• Hands‑on experience with queueing concepts and technologies such as RabbitMQ and Kafka including topics, partitions, consumer groups, and offsets.
• Strong knowledge of data storage technologies such as Postgres, MSSQL Server, MongoDB, Redis, and other data stores.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or similar tools.
• Experience designing APIs and shared platform services consumed by multiple product teams.

Leadership & Mindset

• A true player‑coach who enjoys both coding and leading people.
• Ability to build trust, motivate engineers, and continuously improve team performance.
• Strong communication skills, able to align technical decisions with business goals.
• Pragmatic mindset, knowing when to optimise and when to deliver.
• Passion for building platforms that enable teams to move faster and safer.