PHP/Laravel Developer
- birmingham, england, United Kingdom
- Job type not listed
- £52 - £70 Per Hour
Job Description
Margetts Fund Management is seeking an experienced PHP/Laravel Developer to join its in-house development team.
This is an opportunity to contribute to a greenfield application using a modern Laravel, Inertia.js and Vue.js stack, while also supporting, maintaining and progressively improving an established Laravel web application. The role suits a practical developer who is comfortable across the front end and application layer, delivering new functionality and working responsibly with legacy code. Business logic held in our enterprise data platform is maintained by a dedicated SQL development team, with whom you will work closely.
You will work collaboratively with developers, QA, business analysts and stakeholders throughout the delivery lifecycle, helping to shape technical solutions, produce secure and maintainable code, review changes, troubleshoot issues and contribute to the ongoing improvement of engineering standards and development practices.
The successful candidate will have strong commercial experience with PHP and Laravel, together with hands-on knowledge of Vue.js, ideally with exposure to Inertia.js. They will be able to understand existing systems, diagnose defects, manage technical debt sensibly and deliver well‑tested features that meet business and user needs. They will also contribute to how features are built, look and behave, bringing a considered eye to interface design, usability and accessibility - particularly on the greenfield application, where patterns are still being established.
The company offers a competitive benefits package, flexible working options and regular social events.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, develop and deliver maintainable features for a greenfield web application using PHP, Laravel, Inertia.js and Vue.js.
- Support, maintain and enhance an existing Laravel web application, including defect resolution, performance improvement and technical-debt reduction.
- Develop responsive, accessible interfaces for internal and external users.
- Design and integrate APIs and interfaces between internal systems, third-party services and relational databases.
- Write clean, secure, reusable and well-tested code in line with agreed standards.
- Investigate production issues, perform root‑cause analysis and implement reliable fixes.
- Participate in technical design, estimation, code reviews, testing and release activities.
- Work within a controlled release process, including peer review, approval gates and documented change control.
- Create and maintain concise technical documentation.
- Collaborate with developers, QA, business analysts and stakeholders to refine requirements and deliver effective solutions.
- Contribute to continuous improvement of architecture, development practices, automation and application security.
Skills and Experience
Essential
- Strong commercial experience developing web applications with modern PHP and Laravel.
- Practical experience with Vue.js; exposure to Inertia.js is an advantage.
- Strong knowledge of object‑oriented programming, MVC architecture and common software design principles.
- Experience with MySQL, relational data modelling, migrations and query optimisation.
- Proficiency in JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
- Experience designing, consuming and securing RESTful APIs and system integrations.
- Experience implementing authentication and authorisation against Microsoft Entra ID or a comparable enterprise identity provider (SSO, OIDC or SAML).
- Experience with Git, branching strategies, pull requests and collaborative code review.
- Ability to write and maintain automated tests using PHPUnit, Pest or equivalent tools.
- Strong debugging, problem‑solving and root‑cause analysis skills.
- Experience maintaining and improving legacy applications without disrupting business‑critical services.
- Clear communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a collaborative delivery team.
Desirable
- An eye for interface design and usability, and experience contributing to UX decisions alongside stakeholders or designers.
- Experience with containerisation using Docker and container‑based local or deployment environments.
- Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation and environment configuration.
- Experience with Redis, queues, caching and background processing.
- Familiarity with Vite, Tailwind CSS or other modern front‑end tooling.
- Knowledge of jQuery and experience modernising older JavaScript implementations.
- Experience integrating SQL Server or other enterprise data platforms.
- Understanding of application security, dependency management, performance monitoring and observability.
- Experience using large language models or AI‑assisted development tools responsibly or integrating LLM capabilities into business applications.
- Experience working in financial services or another regulated environment.