Junior .NET developers often ask me the same question:
👉 “What skills should I focus on if I want to grow into a senior role?”
To answer, I went through 100+ Senior .NET job postings. The results were crystal clear — there’s a common stack of skills that employers expect senior engineers to know inside and out.
Here’s the breakdown:
🌐 Core .NET Skills
- C# → Not just syntax, but mastery of modern language features, clean code practices, and performance optimization.
- REST APIs → Designing secure, scalable endpoints with clear documentation is a must.
- GraphQL → Growing rapidly in adoption; schema design and efficient resolvers separate seniors from juniors.
☁️ Cloud Platforms
- Azure → The #1 cloud for .NET; deployment, monitoring, scaling, and App Services are bread and butter.
- AWS → Many companies run hybrid; knowing EC2, Lambda, and S3 shows adaptability.
🗄 Databases
- PostgreSQL → Widely used in modern .NET apps; indexing, tuning, and SQL fluency are expected.
- SQL Server → Still the enterprise standard; stored procedures and performance optimization remain critical.
- Cosmos DB → If you’re in Azure land, NoSQL with Cosmos is everywhere.
🔍 Observability
- Grafana → Dashboards that matter — metrics tied to business outcomes.
- OpenTelemetry → The industry standard for tracing; consistent instrumentation is expected.
- App Insights → Azure-native monitoring; critical for production visibility.
⚙️ DevOps & Infrastructure
- Azure DevOps & GitHub Actions → CI/CD pipelines are no longer optional — they’re expected.
- Terraform → Infrastructure as Code is now table stakes.
- Docker → Baseline for backend devs.
- Kubernetes & Helm → Orchestration and package management for real-world scale.
🔒 Security
- JWT → Token-based auth is everywhere.
- OAuth 2.0 → Delegated access and integration with identity providers is a must.
- TLS → Encryption isn’t optional — certificate management matters.
📩 Messaging & Architecture
- Kafka → Streaming pipelines that handle real-time scale.
- RabbitMQ / Azure Service Bus → Bread and butter for resilient messaging.
- Microservices & Event-Driven Design → The architecture employers expect seniors to drive.
🎨 Frontend
- React → The most in-demand frontend pairing with .NET backends.
- Angular → Still dominant in enterprises.
- JavaScript → The foundation — frameworks change, fundamentals don’t.
