I'm a .NET developer with about four years of experience, mostly building traditional ASP.NET MVC applications. I recently joined a company where I was placed on a new project without a technical lead or anyone with strong experience in the architecture we're using. The rest of the team is at a similar experience level, so we sometimes end up relying on Copilot suggestions without an experienced person to review the decisions.
I now need to make architectural choices involving Azure Service Bus, Durable Functions, Container Apps, communication between containerized services, distributed transactions, dual-write problems, outbox and outbox relay patterns, Microsoft Graph email access and webhooks, and database access across multiple services. I'm especially concerned with making choices that will scale well and remain reliable and maintainable.
I'm not looking for someone to write the system for me or teach every topic from scratch. I'd like to find an experienced developer or architect who could occasionally act as a sounding board, review my reasoning, explain trade-offs, and point out risks I may have missed. Paid mentoring would also be worth considering. I'd appreciate recommendations for books, courses, documentation, or other resources that provide a solid foundation in distributed systems and Azure architecture.
4 Answers
You don’t necessarily need a formal long-term mentor to start. An experienced engineer who is willing to act as a sounding board can still be extremely helpful, especially if you bring a specific design question, a diagram, the constraints, and the alternatives you considered. There are usually people willing to help, although the amount and frequency of guidance may vary.
Professional mentoring is another realistic option. A mentor could review designs, discuss trade-offs, and help you build your own decision-making skills rather than doing the implementation. Expect that experienced architects may charge for their time, so it’s worth agreeing on the format, frequency, and scope up front.
Before choosing an architecture, clarify whether the Azure setup you’re creating is intended to become production infrastructure and what responsibilities your role is expected to cover. If the organization is small or new to cloud development, the lack of technical leadership may be an organizational problem rather than something you’re expected to solve alone. Document your assumptions and ask management for an architecture review process.
It’s also worth checking whether your company has a platform, infrastructure, security, or architecture team. In many organizations, application developers experiment in a development Azure environment, while production infrastructure is reviewed and implemented through a platform team. That review can cover reliability, security, cost, infrastructure as code, and operational standards.
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