Junior .NET Software Engineer

About this role

Explore Learning is a leading educational organisation that is committed to making learning enjoyable and effective for children. With our network of learning centres across the country and our online tutor offering, we help thousands of children develop their skills and reach their full potential.

The Role

We're looking for a junior backend engineer to design, build, and operate cloud-native services on Azure. You'll own systems end-to-end — from C# code through to the Azure infrastructure they run on — and work alongside AI coding agents as part of how we ship.

What you'll do

• Build and maintain backend services in C# / .NET (8+)
• Design and evolve data models in Azure SQL Server, including performance tuning and migrations
• Implement event-driven and asynchronous workflows using Azure Service Bus (queues, topics, sessions, dead-lettering)
• Work with Azure Storage Accounts (Blob, Queue, Table) for durable storage and integration patterns
• Use AI coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Copilot) as part of your daily workflow — scoping tasks, reviewing agent output, and shipping production code with them in the loop
• Write clean, testable code with solid unit and integration test coverage
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, observability, and production support

Must-haves

- Strong C# / .NET backend experience (3+ years)
- Hands-on production experience with
Azure SQL Server
— schema design, T-SQL, indexing, query plans
- Hands-on production experience with
Azure Service Bus
— messaging patterns, idempotency, retries, poison messages
- Hands-on production experience with
Azure Storage Accounts
— Blob and Queue at minimum
- Practical exposure to
agentic software development
— using LLM-based coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) to plan, generate, and review code; understanding their strengths, failure modes, and where human judgment is non-negotiable
- Comfortable with async/await, dependency injection,...