This role is offered on an Italian employment contract. Candidates must be based in Italy as we are unable to support remote working from outside the country due to local employment and tax legislation.

This is a senior individual-contributor role: principal-level technical authority for the .NET-based video and streaming platforms Deltatre operates for sports rights owners, broadcasters, and media companies. The platforms handle live and on-demand video at millions of concurrent viewers; the work involves real architectural decisions that affect real audiences.

The role is hands-on architecture and platform-wide technical influence. You will set engineering direction and standards across the .NET backend estate, lead architectural decisions that span multiple teams, and contribute to the modernisation of core platform capabilities. You will not have direct reports — your authority is technical, exercised through architectural decision records, code review, and the way you raise the standard around you.

Responsibilities

• Own architectural strategy across the .NET video platform — making the decisions that determine scalability, performance, and long-term maintainability
• Lead architectural decisions on backend services for cloud-based media platforms, working with engineering teams from design through delivery
• Define and enforce architectural standards and engineering practices across multiple teams; guide technical decision-making to keep consistency without imposing it
• Lead modernisation of cloud-native operations across managed services, containers, and virtual machines — while keeping critical legacy systems stable through controlled evolution
• Drive CI/CD automation and continuous improvement of engineering standards
• Lead complex production incident response, drive post-mortems that produce systemic fixes
• Lead architecture knowledge-sharing across the engineering organisation and mentor engineers on advanced patterns
• Contribute to the evolution and modernisation of core platform capabilities

You operate at the level where architecture becomes a question of judgement, not just technique. You make decisions that hold up over years, document them clearly, and bring other engineers along with you. You are credible across multiple teams because you do the work and you say what you actually think — not because of your title.

Required

• Substantial production experience with modern .NET (8–10), C#, ASP.NET Core — at architectural depth
• Demonstrated experience leading architecture on cloud-native, high-availability, high-concurrency systems
• Deep grasp of distributed systems — microservices, event-driven design (RabbitMQ or equivalent), background processing
• Experience designing RESTful APIs at scale with contract-first and versioning discipline
• Substantial experience with at least one major cloud platform (Azure, AWS) and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Solid data persistence experience — MS SQL Server, MongoDB, Redis, EF Core or NHibernate
• Demonstrated technical leadership without people management — code quality governance, mentorship, architectural decision authority
• Background in media streaming systems — end-to-end video workflow orchestration, HLS, MPEG-DASH, DRM integration

Valued

• Hands-on experience with FFmpeg or equivalent video processing
• AWS Media Services and Azure Media Services experience at production scale
• Multithreading and parallelisation at performance-critical level
• TDD discipline and unit / integration testing depth
• Familiarity with GitOps workflows
• Experience with multi-region deployments and active-active architectures

Who Thrives Here

Principal engineering work at Deltatre's video platform is technical authority without distance from the code. You are still the person who can sit down with a stuck engineer and work through the problem with them. You are also the person who can sit in a room with product leadership and explain, in their language, why the cheap option for this quarter is the expensive one for next year.

People who thrive in this role tend to be honest about technical trade-offs (they don't oversell solutions or under-warn about risks), generous with their reasoning (they explain why, not just what), and patient with the kind of long-arc work where the value of a decision becomes visible only over time.

Process and what to expect

1. Introductory conversation: this is a step for us to get to know each other better, and for us to answer all questions you might have around Deltatre.
2. Take-Home Assessment: we have a coding challenge waiting for you, to grab a sense of what you'll be dealing with. This step is the entry point in our process, and mandatory to acccess to the followng steps.
3. 1-hour Technical round of Interview: we will use your Assessment as a starting point for a discussion with Senior team members in the video team. You will do code review and discuss additional technical aspects in details. This conversation, combined with the output of the assessment will allow us to make a solid technical evaluation. 
4. 1-hour Competency Based Interview: we are going to ask you some situational questions around how you deal with real-life scenarios at work. Easier doing it, more than explaining it!

If any of these formats would be difficult for you, tell us — we adjust regularly and can usually accommodate.

Accessibility and accommodation questions are welcome at any stage, including before you apply. Tell us what would work for you.