Senior Backend Engineer - .NET Microservices & Performance

Jobtailor; Pretoria; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor in Pretoria, South Africa, is seeking a senior backend engineer to steer the design of high-scale microservices built on .NET 8+ and C# 12+. You will lead architecture discussions, mentor engineers, and tackle high-severity production challenges.

The ideal candidate has 5+ years of backend development, deep SQL Server expertise, and hands-on experience with Redis, Elasticsearch, Dapper, EF Core and modern deployment strategies.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend software development experience.
• Experience building and maintaining microservices at enterprise scale.
• Demonstrated impact on architectural decisions, mentorship, and system optimization.
• Expert-level proficiency in .NET 8+ and C# 12+.
• Strong experience with Dapper / EF Core, including ORM trade-offs and performance tuning.
• Advanced SQL Server skills: query tuning, indexing, execution plans, statistics.
• Deep understanding of ACID, isolation levels, deadlocks, sharding, and partitioning.
• (Beneficial) Redis expertise in distributed caching and invalidation strategies.
• (Beneficial) Elasticsearch experience (indexing, search and aggregation performance optimizations).
• Microservices design: boundaries, communication patterns, service reliability.
• Event-driven architecture: RabbitMQ, Kafka, or Azure Service Bus.
• API design (REST / gRPC), backward compatibility, and versioning strategies.
• Advanced Azure DevOps pipeline design and release management.
• Understanding of modern deployment strategies (blue‑green, canary, etc.).
• Experience with logging, tracing, and performance monitoring (OpenTelemetry).
• Deep experience with testing automation across all testing layers.
• Strong understanding of SOLID principles, design patterns, and refactoring practices.
• Performance profiling, optimization, and debugging complex scenarios.
• Experience leading incident response, post‑mortems, and operational improvement efforts.
• Strong ownership mindset — you take responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks.
• Adaptability in a fast‑moving environment with changing priorities.
• Collaborative and team‑oriented, with strong cross‑functional communication.
• High attention to detail, especially in regulated environments.
• Proactive, solution‑driven, and resilient under pressure.

Responsibilities

• Lead design discussions and influence architecture without formal authority.
• Mentor teams and drive incident response and post‑mortems.
• Ensure reliability, performance and scalability of microservices.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional partners to deliver value.

Skills

Backend Software Development

Microservices Architecture

.NET 8+/C#12+

SQL Server

Performance Tuning

Distributed Caching

Logging/Monitoring

Tools

RabbitMQ

Kafka

Azure Service Bus

Azure DevOps

OpenTelemetry

Redis

Elasticsearch

Dapper

EF Core

Job description

Jobtailor in Pretoria, South Africa, is seeking a senior backend engineer to steer the design of high-scale microservices built on .NET 8+ and C# 12+. You will lead architecture discussions, mentor engineers, and tackle high-severity production challenges.

The ideal candidate has 5+ years of backend development, deep SQL Server expertise, and hands-on experience with Redis, Elasticsearch, Dapper, EF Core and modern deployment strategies.