Cape Town Hybrid Senior .NET Backend Engineer

Protium; Cape Town; Hybrid; ZAR 950,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work

Office meetups 2–3×/week

Contract-to-perm

Job summary

Protium in Claremont, Cape Town, is seeking a Senior Backend C#/.NET Engineer to design, build, and maintain production APIs and services.

This hybrid, cape town-based role requires taking ownership of features end-to-end, collaborating with frontend, QA, product, and clients, and guiding less experienced developers.

You will work with SQL Server and Azure technologies, emphasize clean architecture, security, performance, and long-term maintainability.

Qualifications

• Strong professional experience with C# and .NET / ASP.NET Core.
• Strong experience building, maintaining, and supporting REST APIs in production environments.
• Strong understanding of SQL Server, relational database design, query performance, indexing, and data modelling.
• Experience with data access patterns using EF Core, Dapper, or similar.
• Solid understanding of backend architecture, layering, separation of concerns, and maintainable service design.
• Ability to design and implement backend features with limited supervision.
• Ability to understand business and technical requirements, identify gaps, and ask the right questions before implementation.
• Comfortable making technical trade-offs and explaining the reasoning behind them.
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorisation, validation, error handling, logging, API security, and secure backend development practices.
• Strong engineering habits: clean code, good abstractions, pragmatic design, meaningful tests, and a quality-first mindset.
• Experience reviewing code and giving clear, constructive technical feedback.
• Ability to guide, mentor, and support less experienced developers.
• Ability to own features end-to-end, from design and implementation through to testing, release support, and production troubleshooting.
• Comfortable using Git and working in a collaborative development workflow.
• Comfortable participating in technical discussions with developers, architects, QA, product stakeholders, and client-facing teams.
• Cape Town based and available for regular office meetups in Claremont.
• Comfortable using AI-assisted engineering tools as a productivity lever, while still applying strong judgement around design, correctness, readability, testing, maintainability, and security.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain production-grade APIs & Services using C# and .NET.
• Own backend features and technical workstreams from planning through to implementation, testing, release, and support.
• Design and implement service layers, business logic, integrations, data access layers, background services, and scheduled processing components.
• Work with SQL Server databases, including schema design, queries, indexes, stored procedures where appropriate, and performance considerations.
• Help shape technical approaches, system designs, implementation plans, and delivery trade-offs.
• Review architectural direction and contribute practical feedback before and during implementation.
• Break down complex technical work into clear, deliverable pieces for yourself and other developers.
• Write and maintain automated tests for core backend logic, integration points, and critical workflows.
• Debug, diagnose, and resolve issues across backend services, databases, APIs, integrations, infrastructure touchpoints, and client-facing flows.
• Collaborate with frontend, mobile, QA, design, product, architecture, and client-facing stakeholders to deliver complete working features.
• Participate in and lead code reviews, helping maintain strong engineering standards across the team.
• Mentor intermediate and junior developers through code reviews, pairing, technical discussions, and implementation guidance.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes, release quality, observability, logging, monitoring, and operational improvements where needed.
• Identify technical risks, security concerns, maintainability issues, and performance bottlenecks early.
• Use AI-assisted engineering tools responsibly to improve delivery speed, feedback loops, code quality, and technical decision-making.

Skills

C#/.NET

REST APIs

SQL Server

EF Core / Dapper

Backend architecture

Git

Auth & Security

Testing

Mentoring

Azure

Tools

Azure DevOps

Job description

Protium in Claremont, Cape Town, is seeking a Senior Backend C#/.NET Engineer to design, build, and maintain production APIs and services.

This hybrid, cape town-based role requires taking ownership of features end-to-end, collaborating with frontend, QA, product, and clients, and guiding less experienced developers.

You will work with SQL Server and Azure technologies, emphasize clean architecture, security, performance, and long-term maintainability.