Senior Software Developer

We are recruiting a Senior Software Developer for an established, growing business. This is a hands-on development role with a broader remit than a typical senior developer position, combining business-critical application development with improvements to how software changes are planned, reviewed, secured and released. You will join a small, capable software team and report to the Director of IT in a collaborative, pragmatic environment with considerable scope to influence development standards as the team and technology estate grow. The role is split approximately across 50% hands-on development, 30% delivery, change control and governance, and 20% secure development. The working environment has minimal bureaucracy and values straightforward communication, reliable engineering and solutions that work effectively for operational users. We offer a salary from £55,000 per year and benefits including casual dress, company events, company pension, discounted or free food, employee discount, free parking, on-site parking and work from home. The position is hybrid remote in Chester.

Requirements

- Strong commercial Laravel and PHP development experience - Experience supporting applications relied upon by users in a live operational environment - Demonstrable ownership of change control, release management or software-delivery processes - Practical application-security knowledge, including secure code review, dependency management and secrets hygiene - Confidence using Git, CI/CD pipelines and cloud-hosted deployment environments - AWS experience, ideally - The ability to manage parallel workstreams and communicate progress honestly - Clear written and verbal communication skills - Sound judgement when balancing immediate operational requirements against longer-term technical considerations - Experience using AI-assisted coding tools - iOS development experience using Swift or SwiftUI - App Store release experience - A recognised security, development or delivery qualification - Experience within a multi-site operating environment - Experience introducing greater structure and consistency into a growing development team - Software development: 3 years - Ability to commute/relocate to Chester, Cheshire or plan to relocate before starting work - Work authorisation in the United Kingdom

Responsibilities

- Build, improve and maintain Laravel applications used across the business - Work with PHP, Laravel, MySQL, REST APIs and AWS services - Contribute to mobile development where your experience allows - Deliver reliable, maintainable and well-documented solutions - Develop and improve change control and release processes - Maintain clear records of what has been released, why it changed and how it can be rolled back - Use code reviews as an effective quality control process - Improve branching, deployment and environment-management practices - Help ensure releases are controlled, predictable and production-safe - Coordinate several products and workstreams simultaneously - Identify blockers, risks and potential delays at an early stage - Translate requests from operational and commercial teams into clearly scoped and sequenced development work - Provide straightforward progress updates to non-technical stakeholders - Maintain documentation so that work can be understood and continued by others - Establish practical secure-coding standards, checklists and review criteria - Introduce appropriate dependency scanning, static analysis, secrets management and pipeline controls - Support proportionate threat modelling for new development - Coordinate vulnerability assessment and remediation - Work closely with the wider IT and cyber security function - Help the development team adopt security standards as part of its everyday work