Senior PHP / Laravel developer and engineering lead with 10+ years of professional experience and 20+ years of hands-on coding. Track record of owning and modernising business-critical platforms, integrating complex third-party APIs, and leading small developer teams from planning through delivery. AI-forward approach to development, applying automation, LLM tooling, and workflow pipelines to accelerate delivery and reduce operational overhead.
- PHP 8 Migration: Inherited and fully modernised a legacy PHP codebase to PHP 8, improving performance, type-safety, and long-term maintainability, reducing technical debt across the platform's most critical paths.
- Platform Ownership: Took sole ownership of a business-critical platform segment, designing scalable architecture and ensuring zero-downtime reliability under production load.
- Queuing & Performance: Designed and implemented a Redis-backed queuing system to manage high-volume incoming data, sustaining thousands of database transactions per minute while maintaining reliability and decoupling heavy processing from the application layer.
- Ad Platform Integration: Built server-side conversion tracking and ad spend retrieval integrations across four major advertising platforms (Meta, Snapchat, Reddit, Google Ads) using their respective Conversions and Insights APIs, providing accurate attribution and spend visibility without relying on client-side pixels.
- Marketing Automation Pipeline: Engineered an end-to-end email marketing data pipeline and automation workflow using n8n and custom PHP endpoints, migrating approximately 150,000 subscribers between platforms with zero data loss and automated ongoing event handling.
- Dynamic Component Loader: Designed and built an on-demand dynamic component loader for Vue, enabling runtime resolution and loading of UI components for pages too dynamic to pre-build at deployment.
- Team Leadership: Led a team of 2 developers: code reviews, coding standards, sprint planning, regular 1:1s, personal development, and hiring decisions.
- Interdepartmental Communication: Coordinated with marketing, product, and operations teams to align technical delivery with business objectives.
- API Integration: Delivered 10+ third-party integrations using RESTful and SOAP APIs, connecting payment platforms, CRMs, and internal tooling across a multi-system estate.
- Internal Tooling: Built developer tooling and platform connectors that automated manual workflows, reducing team overhead and accelerating client onboarding.
- Technical Oversight: Oversaw workload distribution and technical direction for a team of 2 developers with regular 1:1s, personal development support, and hiring involvement.
- Team Leadership: Conducted code reviews, set coding standards, ran sprint planning, and contributed to hiring decisions for the team.
- Interdepartmental Communication: Worked cross-functionally with other departments to align technical priorities and ensure cohesive delivery.
- Legacy Platform Management: Administered MySQL databases and Linux servers (CentOS, Ubuntu), maintaining uptime for legacy PHP 5.4 platforms under strict SLAs.
- Recognition: Employee of the Year 2019, IT department, for delivery impact and cross-team collaboration.
- Customer Integration: Integrated 3 enterprise customers via REST APIs and third-party logistics platforms, cutting manual onboarding time through automated data exchange.
- Reporting Tools: Designed and built report generation tools in PHP 7, replacing manual spreadsheet exports and saving up to 3 hours per week.
- Server Administration: Managed Ubuntu and Fedora server environments, overseeing PostgreSQL databases and maintaining service continuity.
- Interdepartmental Communication: Liaised across internal teams to coordinate integration timelines and technical requirements.
- External Partner Communication: Acted as technical point of contact for enterprise partners, managing integration specifications and delivery expectations.
- Platform Development: Built and maintained multi-platform management software in PHP 7, collaborating directly with clients to translate requirements into production-ready features.
- Tooling & Systems: Designed electronic forms to client specification and deployed project management and network monitoring systems.
- Incident Support: Provided 2nd-line application support for bespoke children's services software, investigating, escalating, and resolving incidents against defined SLAs.
- Customer Enablement: Delivered customer-facing WebEx sessions and authored knowledge base documentation to reduce repeat support contacts.
- Project Delivery: Managed hardware and software rollouts across multiple sites, delivering projects on schedule under strict SLAs.
- Field Leadership: Provided on-site technical leadership and training during rollouts, serving as first point of escalation for field issues.
PHP library implementing a SQL-like query language for CSV files, built from scratch with a full lexer, parser, and AST-driven interpreter. Supports SELECT, JOIN, WHERE, aggregate functions, date functions, and streaming mode. 50 tests, 186 assertions, PHPStan, CI via GitHub Actions.
Laravel package providing an Eloquent-inspired ORM for CSV flat files. Read/write, streaming, lazy loading, type casting, automatic backups, append-only mode, and strict header validation via a trait system. Artisan generator included.
Built a community platform from the ground up covering user registration and authentication, user-submitted guides, moderation, and content management. First production Laravel project, developed independently.
Built and operated a vendor transaction management platform handling real-time transaction recording, reporting dashboards, and vendor account management. Redis caching to absorb burst load during month-long events, processing up to 78,000 transactions per event.
Designing and building a multi-server SaaS platform covering live event production, streaming infrastructure, real-time choreography tooling, and managed bot hosting. Handles concurrent events at scale with a multi-tenant infrastructure.