The Problem

Your team is stretched. You've got a critical project that needs senior .NET expertise but your permanent developers are fully committed to ongoing work. Recruiting a permanent hire takes three to six months and you need someone productive now. Agencies want to place a junior developer and charge senior rates. You need someone who can slot in immediately, contribute from day one, and make your whole team more effective — not just fill a seat.

Or your team has a skills gap. You're building on Azure but nobody has deep cloud experience. You're adopting DevOps practices but nobody has set up a CI/CD pipeline before. You need someone who can lead these initiatives while mentoring your existing developers, so the knowledge stays in the team after the engagement ends.

What You Get

A senior .NET developer who slots into your team's workflow — your stand-ups, your sprints, your tools. I pick up tickets, review code, unblock juniors, and ship features. But I also bring strategic thinking: identifying architectural improvements, reducing technical debt, and mentoring your team members so they grow more capable throughout the engagement.

Unlike agency contractors who focus narrowly on assigned tickets, I take ownership of outcomes. If I see a better way to structure the code, a risk that nobody has flagged, or a process that's slowing the team down, I'll raise it. You're hiring a tech lead, not just a pair of hands.

How I Work

I use your tools — Azure DevOps, Jira, GitHub, whatever you've got. I attend your ceremonies: stand-ups, retrospectives, sprint planning, and refinement sessions. I follow your coding standards and naming conventions. The goal is to feel like a permanent team member who happens to be on a contract.

I typically need half a day to one day to get up to speed with a new codebase. I'll read through the solution structure, understand the architecture, and review recent pull requests to get a feel for the team's patterns and conventions. By day two, I'm picking up tickets and contributing to code reviews.

Throughout the engagement, I maintain a running notes document with architectural observations, technical debt items, and improvement suggestions. This isn't busywork — it's a practical handover document that gives your team a roadmap for continued improvement after I leave.

What Sets Me Apart

I've led development teams across three UK councils for 9 years. I understand stakeholder management, deadline pressure, and the realities of working in large organisations. I know how to communicate technical decisions to non-technical managers, how to balance feature delivery against technical debt, and how to navigate the procurement and governance processes that public sector teams deal with.

I'm also used to working in regulated environments where change management, audit trails, and security standards matter. If your organisation has ITIL processes, change advisory boards, or security accreditation requirements, I've worked within all of them and know how to deliver within those constraints without letting them slow everything to a crawl.

Ideal For

Teams with a temporary capacity gap who need senior expertise to deliver a critical project on time. Organisations building their first cloud application who need someone to establish the architecture and patterns before their permanent team takes over. Teams adopting DevOps or CI/CD practices who need hands-on guidance from someone who's set it up many times before. Development teams with mostly junior or mid-level developers who would benefit from senior mentoring, code review, and architectural guidance. And managers who need a trusted tech lead to cover a gap while they hire permanently.

Engagement Models

Full-time embedded: I work as part of your team four or five days a week for the duration of the engagement. This is the most common arrangement and works best for projects lasting one to six months where deep integration with the team matters.

Part-time support: I work two to three days per week, usually combining hands-on development with architecture review and mentoring. This works well for teams that need ongoing senior oversight but don't have enough work for a full-time contractor.

Sprint-based: I join for specific sprints or phases of a project — for example, the initial architecture phase, a complex integration, or a performance optimisation push. This keeps costs contained while giving you access to senior expertise when you need it most.

Example Scenario

A district council's development team of three junior developers was building a new resident services portal in ASP.NET Core. They had the coding skills but lacked experience with Azure deployment, CI/CD, and application architecture at scale. I embedded with the team for four months, established the solution architecture, set up Azure DevOps pipelines, configured Azure App Service with staging slots, and worked alongside the team daily. By the end of the engagement, the juniors were independently deploying to production, writing integration tests, and making sound architectural decisions. The project launched on time and the team has been maintaining and extending it without external help since.

Pricing

£500/day for full-time embedded work with a minimum commitment of one month. Discounted rates are available for engagements of three months or longer — I'll discuss specifics based on the scope and duration. Part-time arrangements at two to three days per week are available at £550/day to account for the context-switching overhead.

All engagements start with a paid one-week trial period. If it's not working for either of us at the end of the first week, we part ways with no further obligation. This removes the risk of committing to a multi-month contract with someone who turns out to be a poor fit.

👥 Team Augmentation