Developer

About Optio Systems:

Optio Systems — formed through the merger of DSL and Datastor — is a leading provider of process control software, trusted by nearly 200 manufacturing sites worldwide. Around 70% of our customers are in the UK & Ireland, with the remainder spread across North America and beyond. While we are a long-established partner to the animal feed industry, our software is increasingly powering other sectors including paints and specialist chemicals.

About the Role:

We are looking for a hands-on, web-focused .NET Developer to help us build, support and test the web applications that manage our industrial control platform.

Initially, this role is focused on full-stack web development — building and maintaining the .NET web applications at the heart of our industrial control platform. As you build familiarity with our codebase, products, and customers, you'll progressively take on responsibility for building our test automation capability, using tools such as Selenium and Azure DevOps to improve test performance, coverage and release confidence across the team. This is a genuine growth path rather than a dual role from day one: you'll spend your first months primarily writing application code, with automation responsibilities increasing as your product knowledge deepens.

You will own features from specification through to deployment and real-world usage, working across the stack in a Microsoft environment and turning complex plant data and workflows into clean, usable web interfaces for our customers. You should enjoy operating at the intersection of software and real-world engineering, be comfortable talking directly to customers when needed, and be motivated by seeing your work running in live manufacturing plants.

You will be based in our Nottingham office, collaborating closely with other developers and control engineers, with some time on customer sites to commission your work and understand how it's used on the ground. You'll be encouraged to take ownership early, with support from experienced colleagues to help you grow your skills and responsibilities over time.

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop features end-to-end, from database schema and SQL queries through to UI and front-end behaviour.
• Work closely with control and automation engineers to understand plant processes and translate them into intuitive web tools and dashboards.
• Support deployments, troubleshooting, and diagnostics for web components in live environments.
• Progressively take ownership of test automation processes, standards, technology and environment as your product knowledge grows.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience building web applications with ASP.NET Core (or .NET Framework) and C#.
• Experience writing SQL queries and working with relational database schemas.
• Comfortable working across the full stack, from database through to UI.
• Ability to work effectively as part of a collaborative team and manage your own workload.
• Proactive, comfortable taking the initiative, and keen to learn about our products and the industrial processes behind them.
• Strong communication skills — clear and succinct, verbally and in writing, at all levels.
• Experience with test automation tools such as Selenium and Azure DevOps.
• Experience working in a Microsoft development environment (Visual Studio, Azure DevOps).
• Exposure to industrial control systems, plant data, or manufacturing environments.
• Experience within the feed, grain, food, bulk materials handling, or wider process manufacturing industries.

Experience with our Imperium4 platform is not required — full training on our platform and internal engineering processes is provided.

How We Think About AI

We expect our engineers to use AI tools heavily to speed up the mechanics of writing code — so more of your time goes toward the things AI can't do for you:

• Knowing what to build — understanding user needs, business context, and judgement that come from real development experience, not just an accurate description of the problem.
• Evaluating quality beyond "tests passing" — judging whether a solution is maintainable, scalable, and understandable by the next person to touch it.
• Navigating ambiguity — working out the right approach when requirements, priorities, and understanding are still evolving.
• System-level thinking — understanding how a change in one part of the system affects everything else.