Senior Full-Stack PHP Engineer

Senior Full Stack Engineer (PHP / Laravel) Contract, Manchester based. Outside IR35, starting early October. Full location detail below. What We're Recruiting For We're hiring a Senior Full Stack PHP engineer to join a long-term team on a genuinely large-scale online marketplace. Very few platforms handle a product catalogue or transaction volume at this level. The roadmap includes agentic AI workflows built into the platform, retail media integrated directly into the marketplace, and infrastructure work targeting cost and performance at high volume. A lot of this is being attempted at volumes that have rarely been tested in a marketplace before, so the work leans research-led rather than routine. It's a fast-paced scale-up environment on a complex platform. You'll do well here if you're comfortable with ambiguity and shifting ground, and confident enough to advocate for the technical decisions you make. What You'll Be Doing You'll join the team part-way through a major, multi-year technology transformation. The current client-facing platform runs on PHP and Laravel, and that's where your day to day sits: fixing real issues and building new features within the existing stack. The longer-term direction is a move towards a service-based architecture, with a move to AWS under active evaluation. As that world takes shape, you'll have room to grow into it. This is genuinely end-to-end full-stack work: front-end, APIs, data, auth and the platform that ties it together. This is a long-term role, part of the fabric of the team rather than a short engagement. No juniors. It's a demanding environment, and you'll need to be productive quickly without a long ramp. Who You'll Be Working With You'll be engaged by hedgehog lab, a UK digital product consultancy and certified B Corp with 20 years behind us and offices in Edinburgh, Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester and London. We place engineers into long-term client teams on complex, high-stakes platforms. This is one of those engagements. Location and remote working Contract, engaged outside IR35 via your own limited company. Starting early October. Flexible working, largely remote. We just ask that you're based within 50 miles of Manchester, as occasional visits to the office will be needed. Applications from outside this area won't be considered. What We Need The essentials: Senior to principal full-stack experience, genuinely end-to-end across front-end, APIs and dataStrong hands-on PHP and Laravel, working in a large, established codebaseYou can pick up and build within an existing platform quickly, rather than only working greenfieldYou can advocate for technical decisions and communicate them clearlyComfortable delivering at pace in a complex, high-volume environmentComfortable working in English, written and spoken Nice To Have Hands-on AWS, ideally with infrastructure as code (Terraform or CDK)Retail or e-commerce backgroundGenAI or agentic workflows in your engineering practice Ready to apply? Submit your application below.