Senior PHP / Laravel Full-Stack Developer(6-12 month contract)

Pen Test Partners works with clients globally, providing cyber security consultancy and testing services. We work across some of the most cutting-edge industries, including Automotive, Aerospace, and Maritime.

With over 120 employees spanning pen testing, consultancy, digital forensics, sales, and support functions, we pride ourselves on working on cool research, delivering exceptional work for our customers, contributing to the greater good of cyber security, and helping people sleep better at night.

Our in-house development team builds and maintains the platforms that support our consultants and customers. Secure coding is non-negotiable — it's the business we're in.

The Role

We're seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Full-Stack Developer to work alongside our lead developer across our portfolio of in-house Laravel applications. You'll design and architect new functionality, deliver features end-to-end, refactor existing code, fix bugs across the stack, and contribute to technical decisions. Peer code review is standard - you'll review and be reviewed.

You'll work within our existing spec-driven AI development process using Cursor, and we'd expect you to help improve it over time.

What you'll be doing

• Take ownership of features end-to-end across multiple Laravel applications — from spec through design, build, test, and deployment
• Design and architect new functionality, making sound technical decisions independently and justifying them in review
• Deliver to agreed timelines, managing your own workload and flagging risks early
• Refactor and improve existing code, including legacy areas, with a pragmatic eye on risk and value
• Diagnose and fix complex bugs across the stack
• Write and maintain robust tests (PHPUnit, Dusk)
• Raise the bar through peer code review — reviewing others' work and welcoming scrutiny of your own
• Improve our spec-driven AI development workflows, sharing what works
• Apply security-first thinking to everything you ship
• Work to tickets, log time accurately, and communicate progress clearly

Essential Experience

• Senior-level PHP and Laravel — you can design, build, and troubleshoot Laravel applications without leaning on AI to do the thinking for you
• Full-stack capability — Blade, Bootstrap, jQuery, and Webpack; confident with semantic HTML and responsive CSS
• MariaDB / MySQL — schema design, query optimisation
• Solid Linux experience — confident managing the application stack (nginx, MariaDB, PHP-FPM, queues, caches); OS-level administration is handled separately
• Git and Bitbucket / Atlassian toolchain (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket Pipelines)
• Testing - PHPUnit, ideally Dusk
• Significant AI-assisted development experience — Cursor or equivalent, using AI to build specs, write code, and review code. You should be fluent with AI tooling but not dependent on it.
• Security-minded development — secure coding practices are non-negotiable given our business
• 10+ years' commercial development experience, with a track record of delivering production applications to deadline
• Prior contracting experience preferred — productive from week one, comfortable owning delivery without close supervision
• Senior communication and review skills — clear written and verbal communication, and the judgement to give and receive technical feedback constructively

Desirables

• SC clearance (or eligibility)
• Experience in or around the cyber security industry
• DevOps / CI/CD pipeline work
• Auth0 experience
• Salesforce development or administration experience

How We Work

• Spec-driven development with AI-assisted workflows (Cursor)
• Atlassian stack: Jira for tickets, Confluence for docs, Bitbucket for source and CI/CD
• Peer review on all changes
• Work is managed through tickets with accurate time logging
• Hybrid working - mostly home-based, monthly day at the office near Buckingham
• 6-12 month contract