.NET Lead

Job Title- .NET Lead

Location- Houston, TX

.NET MICROSERVICES
PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT

Cloud-Native Platforms | Distributed Systems | AI Exposure

Role Overview

We are seeking a hands-on .NET Microservices Principal Architect to define, build, and govern large-scale enterprise platforms. The role requires deep expertise in C#, .NET, distributed systems, AWS /Azure, security, performance engineering, and production reliability. The architect must remain close to the code, lead critical implementations, guide multiple engineering teams, and translate business goals into secure, scalable, and operable solutions. Practical exposure to AI/LLM integration is preferred.

Core Responsibilities

Hands-on Coding and Engineering Leadership

· Own critical code paths and develop production-grade services, frameworks, reusable components, and reference implementations using C# and .NET 8.

· Conduct code reviews and technical audits covering readability, concurrency, error handling, testability, security, performance, and operational readiness.

· Establish coding standards, design patterns, automated quality gates, unit and integration test practices, and secure development controls.

· Mentor senior engineers and technical leads while resolving complex implementation challenges and design conflicts.

Architecture and System Design

· Lead high-level and low-level design for business-critical, high-throughput, low-latency, and globally scalable platforms.

· Define service boundaries using domain-driven design, bounded contexts, API contracts, data ownership, and evolutionary architecture principles.

· Produce architecture blueprints, sequence and deployment views, non-functional requirements, trade-off analyses, and architecture decision records.

· Lead design reviews across teams and ensure solutions meet scalability, availability, recoverability, maintainability, compliance, and cost objectives.

· Drive modernization of monolithic and legacy platforms into cloud-native, independently deployable services.

Distributed Systems, Reliability and Operations

· Design resilient synchronous and asynchronous workflows using REST, messaging, event streaming, queues, and publish-subscribe models.

· Apply distributed systems patterns including Saga, CQRS, event sourcing where appropriate, idempotency, outbox, circuit breaker, bulkhead, timeout, retry with backoff, rate limiting, and distributed caching.

· Address consistency, availability, partition tolerance, ordering, duplicate delivery, concurrency, distributed transactions, and failure recovery through explicit design decisions.

· Define service-level indicators and objectives, health checks, graceful degradation, disaster recovery, multi-AZ or multi-region strategies, and capacity plans.

Production Troubleshooting and Observability

· Lead diagnosis and resolution of complex production incidents spanning application code, CLR, databases, messaging, containers, Kubernetes, networks, and AWS services.

· Perform root cause analysis using logs, metrics, traces, thread dumps, heap dumps, profiling, query plans, and distributed correlation IDs; convert findings into preventive actions.

· Define observability standards with OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, and centralized logging, including actionable alerts and operational dashboards.

· Improve incident response through runbooks, failure simulations, post-incident reviews, automated remediation, and measurable reliability improvements.

Performance and Scalability Engineering

· Engineer systems to achieve explicit latency, throughput, concurrency, availability, and resource-efficiency targets.

· Lead load, stress, endurance, spike, and scalability testing; analyze bottlenecks across code, CLR, database, cache, network, container, and cloud layers.

· Optimize .NET memory management, garbage collection, thread pools, connection pools, serialization, API payloads, SQL queries, indexing, partitioning, and caching.

· Drive evidence-based capacity planning and performance benchmarking before production releases.

Security Architecture

· Embed security by design through threat modeling, secure coding, least privilege, zero-trust principles, vulnerability management, and secure SDLC controls.

· Design authentication and authorization using OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT, RBAC/ABAC, IAM roles and policies, and service-to-service identity.

· Protect APIs and data using encryption in transit and at rest, secrets management, key rotation, input validation, dependency scanning, audit logging, and abuse prevention.

· Partner with security and compliance teams to address privacy, regulatory, penetration-test, and remediation requirements.

Cloud, DevOps and Platform Architecture

· Architect AWS solutions using ECS/EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, CloudWatch, IAM, DynamoDB, RDS, ElastiCache, VPC, Route 53, and Secrets Manager.

· Define container, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, release, rollback, environment, and deployment strategies using automated controls.

· Balance resilience, security, maintainability, operational simplicity, and cloud cost when selecting services and patterns.

Required Technical Expertise

AI and Engineering Innovation

· Evaluate and integrate AI/LLM capabilities using AWS Bedrock, OpenAI APIs, RAG patterns, embeddings, vector databases, and appropriate guardrails.

· Guide secure and responsible AI integration, including data protection, prompt and output controls, observability, evaluation, cost, latency, and fallback behavior.

· Use AI-assisted engineering for code understanding, test generation, documentation, troubleshooting, and productivity improvements without weakening engineering controls.

Required Experience

Preferred Qualifications and Competencies

· AWS Solutions Architect Professional, AWS Security Specialty, TOGAF, CKA/CKAD, or comparable advanced certification.

· Experience with high-volume platforms, complex modernization, multi-team architecture governance, and AI-powered enterprise solutions.

· Exceptional architecture judgment, hands-on coding depth, analytical troubleshooting, performance mindset, security ownership, communication, and stakeholder influence.

Ideal profile: A hands-on architect who can write and review critical code, lead system design, resolve severe production issues, and drive distributed systems, performance, reliability, security, cloud, and engineering excellence across teams.