Senior Backend Engineer
About the role
Positions are full-time and onsite (in-person) at our office in beautiful Fort Walton Beach, Florida. TalkingParents is seeking a senior engineer who is excited about what AI-assisted development actually looks like in production.
Main Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain C#/.NET backend services - APIs, domain logic, Azure Functions, and data access layers
- Work within an AI-assisted development workflow - reviewing AI-generated code, guiding agent output, writing prompts that produce correct implementations, and knowing when to code by hand
- Own features from technical design through deployment - decompose requirements into implementation tasks, write acceptance criteria, and drive work to completion
- Write and maintain unit tests (MSTest + Moq) using TDD practices
- Design and optimize SQL Server schemas and queries (T-SQL, Dapper, SqlKata)
- Build and maintain Azure Functions for background queue processing, time-triggered tasks, and processing incoming web hooks
- Collaborate with web, mobile, and DevOps engineers to ship cohesive features
- Participate in code review - both reviewing AI-generated PRs and peer-reviewing human work
- Troubleshoot production issues across service boundaries using Application Insights and Raygun
- Contribute to architectural decisions and help evolve the platform's backend patterns
Skills And Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- 5+ years of professional experience building backend services in C# / .NET
- Strong hands-on experience with ASP.NET Core Web APIs - controllers, middleware, dependency injection (Autofac preferred)
- Solid T-SQL skills and experience with database design, query optimization, and data access patterns (Dapper, Entity Framework, or similar ORMs)
- Experience with Microsoft Azure services - App Services, Azure Functions, Azure SQL, Storage Queues, Service Bus, Key Vault
- Practiced TDD workflow - you write tests before implementation, not after
- Experience with Git workflows - branching strategies, pull requests, conventional commits, CI checks
- Comfortable working with AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, multi-agent systems, or similar) - you don't need to be an expert, but you should be curious and unafraid
- Strong problem-solving instincts - you can trace a bug across service boundaries without hand-holding
- Clear written and verbal communication - you'll write technical specs, review AI output, and explain decisions to teammates
- Self-directed with good judgment about when to ask questions vs. when to make a call
Bonus Skills
- Experience with Blazor or other server-side rendered .NET UI frameworks
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures - queues, pub/sub, background job processing
- Experience with Cosmos DB or other NoSQL databases alongside relational stores
- Prior use of AI-assisted development workflows - prompt engineering, agent orchestration, or AI code review
- Experience with IdentityServer or OAuth2/OpenID Connect implementations
- Performance profiling and optimization at scale
- Experience mentoring junior engineers
Work Authorization
Candidate(s) who are offered a position will be required to successfully pass a pre-employment background check and drug screening.
Note To Applicants
Salary or wages listed on Indeed.com or TheLadders.com are not based on actual data for this job listing. The salary ranges any third party provides with listings on their websites are based on their own salary calculators and are not accurate for the Northwest Florida area. Candidate(s) who are offered a position will be required to successfully pass a pre-employment background check and drug screening.
Equal Opportunity Employer
No outsourcing or recruiting firms, please.