Senior Software Developer (Contract)

We are looking for a Senior Software Developer to join Ashbury on a contract basis, starting immediately, to build out our portfolio of AI-assisted regulatory and artwork tools. This is a hands-on development role: most of your week will be spent designing, writing, testing and shipping code, taking prototypes that already exist and turning them into tools our advisors use every day.

Ashbury is a trusted technical and regulatory services provider to the food industry. We are developing tools that improve the speed, accuracy and consistency of specification and artwork work, including Pack Copy and final-artwork alignment, artwork version comparison, international regulatory adaptation and retailer-specific specification checks. These tools combine document processing, OCR and rules with generative AI, and you will work alongside our IT team and regulatory specialists to deliver them in small, usable releases.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build the features behind Ashbury’s regulatory and artwork tools, taking working prototypes through to production and delivering in small, frequent releases that save advisor time and reduce regulatory or artwork risk.
• Choose the right approach for each problem, blending deterministic rules, document processing, OCR and generative AI, and favouring reproducible, explainable outputs where they feed regulated decisions.
• Build LLM-backed features properly: structured prompting, evaluation against representative test data and golden outputs, and clear thresholds for accuracy, latency and cost before anything is released.
• Work directly with our regulatory specialists to turn retailer and market knowledge into testable rules, reusable components and terminology mappings.
• Write well-tested, maintainable code in source control, ship through our existing Azure DevOps pipelines and document what you build so the internal team can support and extend it.
• Follow secure-by-design practices (least privilege, secrets management, privacy controls, dependency hygiene) and take part in code reviews with the rest of the development team.
• Help shape the technical direction of the tools as they grow, including how they are hosted on Azure, working with Ashbury’s IT team rather than owning the platform alone.

Experience:

Essential

• Senior-level software engineering experience, including building new products, developing and maintaining existing ones in production.
• Hands-on proficiency with C#/.NET and Azure (Functions, App Service, storage and AI services), with strong API, data-processing and systems-integration skills.
• Practical experience building LLM-backed features: prompt design, evaluation, guardrails and cost control, using Azure OpenAI or similar APIs.
• Experience taking prototypes or digital products through to production launch, controlled rollout and ongoing improvement.
• Comfortable working in a small team alongside non-technical specialists, turning their knowledge into clear, testable increments.

Desirable

• Experience with OCR, computer vision, PDF processing, artwork comparison, multilingual content, rules engines or document intelligence.
• Python for data-processing or AI tooling alongside the .NET stack.
• TypeScript/React, or experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.
• Containers, Git workflows and automated testing in an Azure DevOps environment.
• Experience in FMCG, retail, regulatory technology or another controlled environment.