ABOUT US

Horizon Labs is an AI and digital engineering consultancy. We take Australian businesses from legacy systems to production AI: modernisation, data infrastructure, intelligent software, and the measurement to prove it works.

THE ROLE

We're hiring a Lead .NET / Cloud Engineer to anchor a major Australian client engagement: a multi-phase platform programme on Azure that runs from foundation modernisation through to AI capability. The first commercial API consumer goes live early in the programme, so this is a delivery role from day one. It is hands-on, code-first, and includes leading a small delivery team.

This is an AI-native engineering role. You'll write production .NET alongside AI coding assistants every day, and you'll build features that put LLMs, agents and RAG into the platform itself.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Lead .NET API modernisation: upgrades from .NET Framework to up-to-date .NET, EF Core migration, architectural-pattern refresh, security and observability uplift.
- Drive security hardening across a live production estate: secrets containment, managed identity replacing stored credentials, Key Vault-first configuration, network isolation.
- Stand up commercial API surfaces on Azure APIM: gateway policies, products and subscriptions, metering, security and latency protocols, with the first external consumer live in the first phase.
- Architect the data layer alongside the APIs: schema design across a multi-database Azure SQL estate, migration sequencing, high-volume content migration tooling, integration with new frontends.
- Build AI-native features into the platform: agent backends in .NET,



RAG pipelines, LLM integration, and the evaluation harnesses that gate what ships.
- Own the Azure environment end to end: App Services, SQL, Key Vault, managed identity, network isolation, observability.
- Lead a small engineering team: pairing, code review, technical mentoring, raising the AI fluency of the people around you.
- Be client-facing. Run workshops, present trade-offs, defend architectural decisions to senior stakeholders.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

Must have

- 10+ years of .NET / C# engineering, including production .NET Core and recent .NET 8 or .NET 10 work
- At least one production modernisation taking a .NET Framework system to modern .NET, including EF Core migration planning across major versions
- Deep Azure platform experience: App Services, APIM, Azure SQL, Key Vault, managed identity, network design
- AI-native coding habits. You use Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or equivalent every day, and your code review reflects it
- Production AI feature experience. At least one of: agent backends, RAG pipelines, LLM integration, function/tool calling, evaluation harnesses
- Strong API design background: RESTful patterns, OAuth/OIDC, OpenAPI, contract-first




- Production CI/CD with Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions
- Experience leading a small engineering team
- Confidence in front of senior stakeholders. You can explain a trade-off without hiding behind jargon

Nice to have

- Semantic Kernel, LangChain.NET, or equivalent agent framework experience
- Azure AI Foundry / Azure OpenAI integration in production
- Vector store experience: Azure AI Search, pgvector, Pinecone
- LLM evaluation and observability: golden datasets, eval harnesses, drift detection
- Azure APIM policy authoring: custom policies, named values, products, subscriptions
- Experience with monetised APIs, any consumption or usage-based model
- Azure SQL elastic pools and many-database estates
- Security remediation on live estates: secrets rotation, exposure containment, hardening under audit conditions
- Bicep or Terraform fluency
- Integration with commercial SaaS APIs: accounting, invoicing, partner platforms

ABOUT YOU

- You write code, and you want to keep writing code. This is not a slideware role.
- You treat AI assistants as part of the craft. You know when to use them, when to override them, and when to read the diff line by line.
- You make architectural calls with confidence and own the consequences.
- You think in trade-offs, not absolutes.
- You deliver to fixed milestones and know what it takes to hold a date without burning the team.
- You can sit with a customer's CTO on Monday and a junior dev on Tuesday and meet both where they are.
- You read the room. You know when to push back and when to ship.

📌 Lead .NET / Cloud Engineer (Azure) (Australia)
🏢 Horizon Labs
📍 Australia