Software Developer Backend & AI

Salary: £45,000 - 55,000 per year

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend software development experience and hands-on AI/LLM experience, including production experience shipping AI-powered features.
• Experience with C#/.NET backend development, APIs, asynchronous programming, scalable design, SignalR, SOLID principles, OOP, dependency injection, interface-based design, and layered architecture.
• Experience with unit and integration testing, TDD principles, and automated pipelines.
• Familiarity with Entity Framework, Dapper, or an equivalent ORM; PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server; efficient SQL, schema design, and query optimisation.
• Experience integrating third-party APIs, processing background jobs, and delivering work in Agile or sprint-based environments.
• Familiarity with Nginx, production monitoring and troubleshooting, and building and deploying self-hosted or on-premises software.
• Experience with role-based access control, audit logging, secure-by-design practices, and optimising queries and indexes for large time-series or event tables.
• Experience handling real-time data streams and large datasets, including ingestion, aggregation, caching, and performance at scale.
• Experience using AI development tools such as Claude Code or GitHub Copilot.
• Hands-on experience connecting to OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar services, including prompting, context handling, and structured outputs.
• Working understanding of LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector search, and semantic similarity.
• Production experience with LLM-powered features, including managing cost, latency, usage limits, and fallbacks.
• Experience designing retrieval pipelines over customer documents and data, including chunking, embeddings, vector storage, and semantic search.
• Experience measuring AI output quality using evaluation sets, feedback scoring, and regression testing.
• Hands-on experience designing agentic workflows, including orchestration, memory, and tool-use patterns.
• Experience fine-tuning or adapting models, such as with LoRA or PEFT, and understanding when fine-tuning is preferable to prompting or RAG.
• Experience running local or self-hosted LLMs, such as Ollama, vLLM, or llama.cpp, for on-premises or air-gapped environments.
• Good communication skills and the ability to explain technical topics to non-technical stakeholders without jargon.
• Ability to build and maintain relationships, manage and prioritise tasks, report progress promptly, and escalate issues when needed.
• Ability to learn and adapt quickly; reliability, self-discipline, initiative, motivation, problem-solving, flexibility, resourcefulness, creativity, and curiosity.
• Relevant higher education qualification (BA or BSc) preferred; a bachelors degree is preferred.
• United Kingdom work authorisation required.
• Desirable: React with TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/UI, Python for AI tooling and evaluation scripts, Semantic Kernel or LangChain, Docker and containerisation, and knowledge graphs.

Responsibilities

• Design and build secure, scalable backend services, APIs, and integrations in C#/.NET.
• Integrate LLMs such as Anthropic and OpenAI into production features, including prompts, structured outputs, context handling, and error handling.
• Manage the cost, latency, and reliability of AI features, including usage tracking, per-user limits, and fallbacks.
• Build retrieval and search capabilities using embeddings, vector search, and RAG over customer data and documents.
• Design agentic workflows, including orchestration, memory, and tool use, and build MCP servers and tools that provide AI with safe access to data and systems.
• Measure AI output quality using evaluation sets, user feedback scoring, and regression checks.
• Write and optimise SQL for large event and time-series datasets to keep dashboards and reports performant.
• Build real-time features, background jobs, role-based access control, and tamper-evident audit logging.
• Apply security practices, including threat modelling and vulnerability scanning, and maintain awareness of the Cyber Resilience Act and AI Act.
• Analyse AI challenges, keep up with emerging approaches, and develop creative ideas into working proofs of concept.
• Evaluate, fine-tune, and deploy local or self-hosted LLMs.
• Take part in code reviews and share backend and AI best practice with the team.
• Follow QA procedures and processes defined in accordance with ISO 9001.

Technologies:

• AI
• Backend
• C#
• Claude Code
• Copilot
• CSS
• Dapper
• Docker
• Fine-tuning
• GitHub
• IoT
• LLM
• MCP
• Nginx
• OOP
• PostgreSQL
• Python
• RAG
• React
• SQL
• Security
• SignalR
• TDD
• TypeScript
• vLLM
• UX UI Design
• ASP.NET
• API
• Frontend
• Web

More:

We are M.A.C. Solutions, a specialist provider of Industrial Data Communication, M2M, and Change Management solutions for the Process and Automation markets. Our software division, ProcessVue, develops applications for the Alarm Management and IoT Analytics markets. With offices in the UK and Europe, we continue to grow nationally and internationally, helping customers connect, secure, and analyse their assets and data. We are seeking a Backend & AI Software Developer to join our development team at our software development centre in Chesterfield, working on the AI and data side of our software. This is a full-time, hybrid/remote role based in Chesterfield. The salary is £45,000–£55,000 per year. Benefits include company events, cycle to work scheme, employee and store discounts, mentoring, free parking, gym membership, a health and wellbeing programme, paid volunteer time, a referral programme, and work-from-home arrangements.

last updated 40 week of 2026