West Yorkshire, UK · Open to opportunities
I’m a senior engineer and technical lead with 20+ years of commercial experience building, scaling and rescuing PHP systems — full-stack LAMP/LEMP applications, multi-tenant SaaS products and API-driven platforms that other businesses depend on.
My depth is in PHP 8 and Laravel, REST API architecture, MySQL performance and AWS. I’ve owned systems end to end: designing service boundaries and integration layers, modernising legacy codebases without stopping delivery, tuning the queries and queues that fall over first, and running the infrastructure and pipelines underneath it all. I’ve led technical and security strategy across multiple business units, made the architectural calls, and been accountable for whether they held up in production.
Just as importantly, I lead people. I recruit, mentor and grow engineers, run code review as a teaching tool, and translate messy business requirements into software a team can still maintain three years later.
I’m currently looking for my next senior, lead or principal engineering role in the UK — remote or hybrid from West Yorkshire.
RESTful API platforms and large-scale integration layers, designed for reliability, performance and maintainability — plus API rescue, performance tuning and legacy modernisation.
Serverless and containerised production platforms on AWS, with automated pipelines, infrastructure as code and observability that surfaces problems before customers do.
Expert-level Laravel across monoliths, SaaS products and serverless platforms, with MySQL design and query optimisation, TDD, and a front end when it's needed.
Oct 2024 — Jan 2026
Owned the architecture of high-performance Laravel and PHP backend systems, with secure REST API design, microservice-style service boundaries and integration layers connecting complex internal workflows to external platforms. Designed reporting and analytics modules that turned very large datasets into actionable business intelligence through optimised SQL, automated pipelines and dashboards. Worked end to end across backend, infrastructure, testing and deployment, raising release quality and operational reliability, while mentoring junior engineers through coaching, code review and pairing.
Oct 2021 — Sept 2024
Set and owned technical and security strategy across four business units — architecture, infrastructure, backend systems, DevOps practice and production reliability. Designed and ran AWS infrastructure on EKS, ECR, CloudFront, S3, Route53, Lambda, RDS, SES and ElastiCache, and built a Laravel serverless platform combining hands-on development with cloud-native design. Rescued and stabilised business-critical API integrations, and led DevSecOps initiatives spanning federated login, centralised password management, mobile device management and secure deployment workflows. Recruited, mentored and grew the engineering team.
2006 — 2021
Fifteen years of hands-on commercial PHP across LAMP and LEMP stacks: bespoke applications, SaaS products, ecommerce and publishing platforms, third-party integrations and long-running legacy modernisation programmes. Progressed from delivery to technical ownership — database design and query tuning, performance work, release process and the production support habits that come from being the person who gets called when it breaks.
If you need someone to lead a Laravel platform, take ownership of an API estate, or steady a team through an AWS move — I’d be glad to talk. Happy to share a full CV and references on request.
hello [at] kycodes [dot] dev