.NET Developer Windows Integration Agent

.NET Developer — Windows Integration Agent

Company: Scalixity Private Limited

Location: Remote / Gwalior

Employment Type: Contract

Experience: Mid–Senior (3+ years)

About the Role

We're building a lightweight, always-reliable Windows background service that bridges an on-premise application to our AWS cloud. This service runs unattended on a client's machine — reading data from a local application over its XML/HTTP interface and securely pushing it to the cloud, on a schedule and on demand.

The reliability bar is high: this isn't works on my laptop — it's software that recovers on its own when its dependency was offline and picks up where it left off. We're looking for someone who has genuinely built this kind of thing before.

What You'll Build

• A .NET Windows Service that runs in the background, starts on boot, and requires no logged-in user
• A resilient work loop: pull data from a local endpoint, push it to a cloud API over HTTPS, on a configurable schedule and via an on-demand trigger
• Health reporting back to the cloud, so a stalled sync is visible rather than silently dead
• A clean install/update path that deploys to a client machine without a manual checklist

Must-Have Skills

• C# and modern .NET (8/9) — current and day-to-day, not .NET Framework-only
• Windows Services / Worker Services — shipped a background service using the Worker Service template, BackgroundService / IHostedService; understands lifecycle, graceful shutdown on a CancellationToken, and running with no user logged in
• HttpClient done properly — IHttpClientFactory, timeouts, resilient calls (retry with backoff, e.g., Polly); understands why new HttpClient() in a loop is a bug
• XML in C# — parsing and building XML payloads (System.Xml / LINQ to XML / serialization)
• Resilience instinct — designs the work loop so one failed cycle logs and retries instead of killing the process
• Publishing & deployment — dotnet publish to a self-contained single-file executable; installing/managing a service via sc.exe / PowerShell, so the client needs no pre-installed runtime
• Logging & config — ILogger, structured logs, Windows Event Log, appsettings.json + environment config, secrets kept out of source
• Windows networking reality — comfortable with localhost services, firewalls, unattended machines, and outbound-only (NAT'd) connections

Strongly Desirable

• Secure credential handling on Windows (DPAPI / protected config)
• Comfort with any cloud provider (AWS a plus) — POSTing to a cloud ingest endpoint, reasoning about outbound-only connectivity and VPN/firewall paths
• Experience building an installer (MSI / WiX / Advanced Installer)

Nice to Have

• Integrating with a third-party or on-premise system over HTTP or ODBC
• Experience shipping software that runs on customers machines
• Idempotency / data-sync patterns (dedupe on re-send, what changed since last time)
• Heartbeat / health-reporting design

How We'll Assess

We'll walk through a real-world scenario together: A Windows service pulls from a local app every N minutes and pushes to a cloud API. The local app is sometimes closed; the network sometimes drops; a push sometimes half-succeeds. Walk through your loop, your error handling, and how you'd stop a re-sent batch creating duplicates.

A strong answer reaches — unprompted — for BackgroundService + CancellationToken, a try/catch inside the loop, retry with backoff, an idempotency key, and a heartbeat.