Lead Development Engineer (81D81D1)

Referment; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Referment is seeking a hands‑on senior/lead engineer to join our UK analytics and actuarial practice. You will partner with product delivery teams, sketching architecture, shaping options and delivering high‑impact features across diverse codebases.

You'll mentor engineers, drive AI‑enabled SDLC improvements, champion testing, CI/CD and observability, and help build shared services while ensuring security and production readiness in a fast‑moving environment.

Qualifications

• Experience with C#/.NET in a product or platform context.
• Strong architectural thinking and ability to explain tech to non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with Azure PaaS/SaaS and Azure services.
• Experience with RESTful WebAPI and Azure SQL/CosmosDB.
• Experience with Azure DevOps and CI/CD practices.
• Ability to upskill quickly in unfamiliar technologies and lead by example.
• Excellent planning and multi-stream management.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with product delivery teams, embedding where useful, to develop technical architecture recommendations and implementation support.
• Identify opportunities to simplify, standardise or consolidate solutions into reusable components and services.
• Help drive the evolution of SDLC practices for AI-enabled development, reducing friction while maintaining quality and sustainable delivery.
• Champion proportionate engineering practices: automated testing, CI/CD, coding standards, observability, technical debt management and maintainable code.
• Contribute hands-on to the design and development of shared packages and services.
• Work with platform and infrastructure teams to keep solutions secure, compliant, operable and supported in production.
• Mentor developers and act as an approachable technical authority, translating business needs into practical technical options and trade-offs.

Skills

C#/.NET

Azure

REST APIs

Azure SQL

CosmosDB

CI/CD

Mentoring

Tools

Azure DevOps

Terraform

Job description

Referment is working with a UK analytics and actuarial consultancy that combines sector expertise with technology to advise clients across pensions, investment, insurance, energy and health. Technology sits at the centre of how the firm works, both in the products it provides to clients and in the digital services, platforms and applications its own people rely on. You would join the engineering function that develops, operates and continually improves those products and services.

The Role

You’ll act as a hands‑on technical partner to product delivery teams, working across codebases of varying maturity and technical constraints. Depending on the need, you might help a team assess options and shape an architecture before they take delivery forward themselves, or work alongside them to design and implement the complex, high‑impact elements. You’ll also contribute to central products, services and shared components, and help shape how the firm builds software as AI changes engineering practice.

• Collaborate with product delivery teams, embedding where useful, to develop technical architecture recommendations and implementation support.
• Identify opportunities to simplify, standardise or consolidate solutions into reusable components and services.
• Help drive the evolution of SDLC practices for AI‑enabled development, reducing friction while maintaining quality and sustainable delivery.
• Champion proportionate engineering practices: automated testing, CI/CD, coding standards, observability, technical debt management and maintainable code.
• Contribute hands‑on to the design and development of shared packages and services.
• Work with platform and infrastructure teams to keep solutions secure, compliant, operable and supported in production.
• Mentor developers and act as an approachable technical authority, translating business needs into practical technical options and trade‑offs.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong, demonstrable experience with C#/.NET.
• Azure PaaS/SaaS offerings, including Functions, App Services, Service Bus, Table/Queue/Blob Storage, Event Grid, Application Insights and Azure Batch.
• ASP.NET WebAPI (RESTful) plus relational (Azure SQL) and non‑relational (CosmosDB, Table Storage) databases.
• Azure DevOps.
• Ability to architect well‑reasoned solutions pragmatically and explain engineering and technology concepts clearly to technical and business stakeholders.
• Comfortable rapidly upskilling in unfamiliar technologies; a proactive, logical problem‑solver who leads by example.
• Strong planning and organisational skills, able to manage several work streams at once while balancing business priorities and quality.

Desirable

• Knowledge of building Generative AI / LLM‑powered solutions (OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex).
• Knowledge of effective use of agentic coding tools and techniques.
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform).

This could suit a senior or lead engineer from a product engineering background who enjoys shaping architecture as much as writing code, and who likes moving between teams rather than staying on a single codebase.