We're a Brisbane-based software development and AI consulting agency, and we love what we do. Since 2019 we've been building web, mobile, cloud and integration projects for clients in healthcare, legal, construction and professional services, plus a few products of our own. There are around 30 of us across Australia and the Philippines.

We're a passionate, enthusiastic bunch who get genuinely excited about valuable code and new tech. A lot of us are gamers, and most of us would call each other friends rather than just colleagues. We're looking for someone who'll fit right in: good at what they do, keen to keep getting better, and good company along the way.

On the work side, we do custom software, app development, systems integration, code audits, SaaS and AI enablement. That increasingly means building AI features into client systems as well as using AI tools to ship faster ourselves.

The role

You’ll be a hands‑on Laravel developer working across client projects and internal products. You’ll take a feature from spec to production, covering the back end, front end, tests and deployment. Some of the work is new builds, some is extending and fixing existing codebases, and some is auditing and improving code other people wrote.

We expect you to work independently, own your tickets, and tell us early when something's off.

What you’ll be doing

- Building and maintaining Laravel applications end to end: APIs, admin panels, background jobs, integrations and front ends
- Building modern front ends in React and Next.js
- Working on a large existing project that includes a significant jQuery front end, which you’ll be extending and maintaining alongside more modern parts of the stack




- Turning specs and tickets into working, tested code, and pushing back when a spec doesn't make sense
- Designing database schemas and writing efficient queries, and fixing the slow ones
- Integrating with third‑party systems such as payment gateways, CRMs, Microsoft 365/SharePoint, and client APIs
- Building AI‑powered features into client applications
- Using AI coding agents in your daily workflow, and reviewing their output as carefully as you’d review a colleague’s
- Writing automated tests and keeping CI pipelines green
- Reviewing teammates' merge requests and having your own reviewed
- Contributing to code audits of client and third‑party codebases
- Keeping your tickets updated in Jira and committing often with ticket references

4+ years of commercial software development

4+ years of commercial software development, with at least 3 of those spent mainly on Laravel. By commercial, we mean you’ve worked in a team, on production systems with real users, real deadlines and real consequences when things break.

A note on AI and experience.

We’re big fans of AI tools and use them every day, and we’d expect you to as well. For this role, though, we need someone whose foundations were built through hands‑on industry experience. That experience means you’re not dependant on AI tools,



and spot when an AI agent has confidently got it wrong, or steer it towards a better way based on your experience. AI should make you faster, not stand in for knowing the craft.

Required skillsBack end

- Modern PHP (8.2+): strict types, enums, readonly properties, and other current language features
- Current Laravel: Eloquent, queues and jobs, events, policies and gates, form requests, API resources, scheduling and caching
- MySQL/MariaDB: schema design, indexing, query optimisation, and migrations on live data
- REST API design and consumption
- Comfortable working in legacy codebases, including vanilla PHP and older Laravel versions, and upgrading them safely
- React, plus real project experience with Next.js
- jQuery. You’ll need to be genuinely comfortable here, not just able to read it. One of our larger projects has a substantial jQuery front end, and you’ll be working in it regularly.
- Tailwind CSS
- Inertia or Livewire is a bonus - we use them in some projects

Testing and quality

- Writing meaningful tests with Pest or PHPUnit (feature and unit)
- Static analysis and code style (PHPStan/Larastan, Pint)
- A working knowledge of OWASP Top 10 and secure coding in Laravel

Tooling and DevOps

- Git, including branching, rebasing, and writing clear merge requests
- GitLab CI/CD pipelines
- Containerised local development (Docker or Podman)
- Comfortable on the Linux command line
- This is a core part of the role, not a nice extra.

Building with AI

- Tool/function calling, structured outputs, and streaming responses
- RAG: chunking, embeddings, vector search, and checking whether retri

📌 Full Stack Developer (Brisbane)
🏢 Code Squirrel
📍 Brisbane