Senior Full Stack Developer (Laravel and Vue)

About Clockwork IT and TotalCtrl

Clockwork IT is a UK software business headquartered in Warwickshire and part of Banyan Software, a global group that acquires and grows vertical software businesses for the long term. Our core product, TotalCtrl, is a field service management (FSM) platform used by UK service businesses to run scheduling and dispatch, an engineer mobile app, asset and site history, quoting, contracts, planned maintenance, invoicing and reporting.

We are focused on growth in fire and security, solar and renewable energy, and grounds maintenance, and we are building Jerrold, our AI assistant embedded in TotalCtrl. We are a small team, so every hire has real impact on our customers and our product.

The opportunity

TotalCtrl is powerful and proven, but it has grown over many years into a large and complex product. Our customers love what it can do and tell us it can be hard to use. Our next chapter is about simplifying it: cleaner workflows, a modern and consistent Vue front end, faster performance, and a codebase the team can move quickly and safely in.

We are looking for a senior developer who will do more than write code. You will challenge how we work, question assumptions, and help the existing team leave old habits behind. You will set a higher bar on code quality, testing, reviews and delivery, and you will work closely with our Lead Developer and AI Architect to shape the technical direction of the product, including how AI (our Jerrold assistant) becomes part of the core experience.

Key responsibilities

• Simplify the product: Work with the product owner and customers to identify complexity, redundant features and confusing workflows, and redesign them to be simpler and faster.
• Modernise the front end: Lead the move to a consistent, component based Vue 3 front end with a shared design system and a mobile friendly, accessible user experience.
• Refactor the back end: Break down legacy PHP and Laravel code into clean, well structured, testable services; upgrade frameworks and dependencies; remove technical debt.
• Optimise: Improve application and database performance (query optimisation, indexing, caching, queues), with measurable before and after results.
• Raise engineering standards: Introduce and champion code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, coding standards and clear documentation.
• Challenge and coach: Constructively push the team, mentor developers, and lead by example on pace, quality and ownership.
• Ship incrementally: Deliver the rebuild in safe, regular releases alongside live customers, avoiding a risky big bang rewrite.
• AI development: Build AI powered features with the Lead Developer and AI Architect, including LLM integrations, AI assisted workflows and Jerrold capabilities inside TotalCtrl.
• Use AI to go faster: Bring modern AI assisted development practices (Copilot, Claude, Cursor or similar) into the team's daily workflow.
• Architecture input: Contribute to technical roadmap decisions, API design, security and scalability.

Essential skills and experience

• 5+ years of professional PHP development, with deep, hands on Laravel experience (Eloquent, queues, events, policies, testing).
• Strong, recent Vue.js experience (Vue 3, Composition API, Pinia or Vuex, Vite), building complex, data heavy business applications.
• Proven track record of refactoring or modernising a large legacy codebase while it remains live.
• Strong relational database skills (MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQL Server): schema design, query optimisation and indexing.
• A genuine eye for UX and simplicity: you care about how the product feels to use, not just whether it works.
• Automated testing (PHPUnit or Pest, front end testing), Git workflows, code review and CI/CD.
• Confident communicator who can challenge ideas respectfully, explain trade offs, and influence peers and senior stakeholders.
• Experience working in or leading small, agile teams with a strong sense of ownership.

Desirable skills

• Hands on experience building AI features: LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic or similar), prompt engineering, retrieval (RAG), agents or tool calling.
• Experience with design systems and UI libraries (Tailwind CSS, PrimeVue, Vuetify or similar), and working with designers in Figma.
• REST API design and integration, and some exposure to mobile app back ends.
• Cloud and DevOps experience (AWS or Azure, Docker, Laravel Forge or Vapor).
• C# / .NET exposure, useful for parts of our wider estate.
• Background in B2B SaaS, field service management, ERP or workflow software.
• Experience mentoring developers or acting as a tech lead.

What success looks like

• First 90 days: understand the TotalCtrl codebase and customers, agree a simplification and modernisation plan with the Lead Developer, and ship first improvements.
• 6 months: code review, testing and release standards embedded across the team; first redesigned core workflows live with customers on the new Vue front end.
• 12 months: a noticeably simpler, faster TotalCtrl; fewer support tickets caused by usability; a team that ships more often with fewer defects; AI features delivering value to customers.

The person we are looking for

You are pragmatic, not precious. You prefer simple over clever, you are comfortable saying "we should stop doing this", and you bring others with you rather than working around them. You enjoy making a complex product feel easy, and you are curious about how AI can change what business software can do.