Senior Laravel Engineer · Remote-first, UK

Jayenne Montana

I build the hard parts of software, then ship the whole thing.

A senior full-stack engineer with over 23 years turning complex problems into products people actually want to use. I design AI-driven matching, scoring and reputation systems, then ship them end to end on Laravel: secure, properly tested and mindful of what they cost to run.

LinkedIn

In short

My focus is the difficult middle of software: the matching engines, data pipelines, state machines and trust systems that most teams find daunting. I have built and shipped complete, tested platforms single-handed, so my interest in doing things properly is backed by things that actually run. I use AI the way a senior engineer should: to move quickly on the work that is merely laborious, so I can spend my judgement where it counts, on architecture, design and the real problem underneath the brief.

What I do best

  • Design matching, scoring and recommendation systems, and the secure platforms around them.
  • Take an idea from prototype to a tested, production-ready Laravel product.
  • Lead and mentor small teams, and work happily as a hands-on senior in a larger one.
  • Solve the unpredictable problem that lands on the desk that morning.

What I am looking for

  • A permanent senior or lead engineering role, remote-first.
  • A team that values craft over theatre and people over slogans.
  • Work I can be proud to build, for a company that treats its people, customers and users with respect.
  • Room to do deep work, and the trust to ship it.

How I work

Depth, then delivery

I investigate a problem properly, its root causes and its knock-on effects, then I commit and ship. Exploration that never lands the plane is just expensive. I have delivered whole platforms on my own, so the analysis always turns into something that runs.

The right effort for the moment

I ask what a piece of work genuinely needs: research, a second opinion, a quick fix or a finished product. Senior engineers allocate their effort rather than spraying it everywhere, and knowing which mode a task calls for is most of the job.

AI as a force multiplier, not a crutch

AI has shifted the value of our craft from the how of syntax to the why of engineering. It handles the repetitive so I can concentrate on architecture, system design and the actual business problem. It does not replace the engineer; it promotes a good one from bricklayer to architect. The work in my portfolio is the proof that I can still go all the way down.

Sound engineering, all the way down

I care about the things users never see: clean architecture, security treated as mathematics rather than vibes, performance, and infrastructure that respects the bill. A simple, intuitive surface earns its right to be simple by being properly engineered underneath.

Commercially minded

I think past the code to the business it serves. Having run my own studio and delivered fixed-scope work where efficiency was the margin, I understand why a thing needs shipping, not just how, and I design for the cost of running it as deliberately as for the feature itself.

Technical skills

My go-to stack for building and prototyping quickly is the TALL stack: Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Livewire and Laravel.

Languages & frameworks

  • PHP 8.4
  • Laravel 12
  • Symfony components
  • Livewire
  • Alpine.js
  • JavaScript
  • Tailwind CSS
  • HTML5
  • CSS3 / SCSS
  • SQL

Architecture & practice

  • API-first design
  • Actions & DTOs
  • State machines
  • Event-driven systems
  • Queues & background jobs
  • Domain modelling
  • Test-driven development
  • Pest / PHPUnit
  • CI/CD
  • Git

Data, AI & algorithms

  • Matching & recommendation engines
  • Signal scoring
  • Multi-armed bandits (Thompson sampling)
  • Data ingestion & enrichment
  • AWS Bedrock
  • Applied AI: classification & sentiment
  • Schema & query optimisation

Cloud & infrastructure

  • AWS (EC2, RDS, S3)
  • DigitalOcean
  • Redis
  • Memcached
  • Managed databases
  • Decoupled message queues
  • Nginx / Apache
  • Cost-aware architecture

Security

  • Encryption at rest (CipherSweet)
  • Blind indexing
  • Signed URLs
  • Auth & permissions
  • Secure file handling

Product & people

  • UI / UX & information architecture
  • Adobe CC (Photoshop, Illustrator, XD)
  • SEO & performance
  • Agile / Scrum
  • Team leadership & mentoring

Selected work

Three platforms, designed and built end to end. I am happy to walk through any decision in any of them, in as much depth as you like.

Founder & sole engineer · live · four-year part-time build · PHP 8.4, Laravel 12, Pest

Gobi: social discovery and matching platform

A platform engineered to connect people honestly, where the member's own values outrank the engagement algorithm.

At its heart is an in-house, purpose-agnostic matching engine that scores weighted signal vectors rather than ticking rigid boxes. Swap the signal set and the same engine finds a partner, a co-founder or a bandmate. I call the idea social sphereing, and dating is simply its first proving ground.

The engineering underneath
  • Truth, enforced not trusted. The social graph acts as a live validation engine for the dating graph. A decoupled service layer feeds behavioural signals to AWS Bedrock for persona inference and stores versioned snapshots, so when a profile drifts from a member's real behaviour over a trailing month, a background pipeline flags it.
  • A reputation cascade modelled on PageRank. Standing travels up each invitation lineage, so inviting a bad actor costs the inviter 15% of their own standing. The network self-moderates at the point of entry, because vouching for someone means something again.
  • A purpose-agnostic matching engine. Strategy patterns and exponential decay curves instead of brittle binary filters, with bidirectional strictness so a match never scores higher than the less keen party. That quietly kills false positives.
  • Values that outrank the algorithm. A sovereign disinterests rule means a member's explicit boundaries can never be overridden by whatever would keep them scrolling. The feed will not radicalise people for engagement, by design.
  • Security treated as mathematics. Blind-indexed, CipherSweet-encrypted personal data, liveness checks, and location fuzzing that deliberately never re-fuzzes, because averaging samples is exactly how an attacker triangulates a real position.
  • Infrastructure that respects the bill. Media moderation runs a cost-aware waterfall on AWS Rekognition and only escalates to a second provider when explicit-content ratios spike. The daily prompt schedules no per-user database rows at all, computing its timing from a hash to avoid a thundering herd.

Live and running. Private repository access available to seriously interested parties. [ADD: live URL]

Senior Software Engineer · full-time · 2022 to 2024 · Laravel, Vue/React, PostGIS

Kamma: PropTech compliance and data platform

One of the architects behind a platform that turns a trillion-record geospatial data engine into compliance and energy-performance intelligence for the property industry.

Kamma is the property sector's data provider for location-based compliance and energy performance. I built performant, scalable infrastructure over its core data engine and shipped the products and integrations that put that intelligence into customers' hands.

The engineering underneath
  • A national-scale geospatial engine. Built and maintained Laravel and Vue/React products delivering sophisticated backend analytics through SaaS platforms and robust APIs over a trillion-record PostGIS data store.
  • Marketplace expansion. Spearheaded a standalone Laravel/React application for the ReapitCRM marketplace, embedding compliance tools directly into the workflows of letting agents and property managers and significantly extending Kamma's client reach.
  • Partner SDKs. Designed RESTful APIs and the associated SDKs that let third-party partners integrate Kamma's intelligence into their own systems, solidifying its position as the industry's primary data provider.
  • Retrofit and energy efficiency. Built a tool that translates abstract EPC data into an actionable roadmap, helping homeowners reach specific EPC bands or budget goals and generating optimised retrofit packages, in direct support of the UK's move to carbon neutrality.
  • Clean code as policy. Maintained clean, tested code while evolving the core platforms from legacy versions to modern, performant architectures.

My work supported Kamma's recognition as "Best ESG Data Provider" and its Green Homes Finance Accelerator funding for retrofit optimisation.

Sole engineer · client delivery to a shifting brief · API-first, Actions & DTOs, Pest

Buy/Sell/Merge: M&A practitioner platform

A data and matching platform that surfaces acquisition opportunities across roughly 300,000 firms and 18 million datapoints.

Built for a client in the UK accountancy sector, this is far more than buyer-to-seller matching. It is a self-regulating data engine, a governed deal pipeline and an intelligent outreach system, delivered against a brief that kept evolving as we learned what the market needed.

The engineering underneath
  • An autonomous data discovery and enrichment engine. Resource-grouped ingestion queues prioritised by data richness and staleness, with silent-zero detection, stall-cluster reclaim and live dashboard streaming.
  • A disciplined pipeline. Collection, sanitisation, normalisation and a three-stage validation cascade, using a first-writer-wins provenance pattern to eliminate duplicates at scale.
  • A scoring engine. It reads Companies House name-change histories and multi-office footprints to infer appetite, ability to buy and succession risk, matching practices closely enough to make post-deal integration smoother and cheaper.
  • A deal state machine. Governed, conditional progression with anonymous teasers, e-signable NDAs, CipherSweet-encrypted financials and secure S3 vaults behind signed URLs.
  • A high-deliverability outreach engine. Built on the principle that volume is vanity. Content variants and send windows are both treated as arms in a Thompson-sampling model, tuned by daily feedback on reply warmth and bookings, skipping weekends and bank holidays. It pairs live SpamAssassin scoring with an asynchronous AI pipeline that scores reply intent, funnels warm leads to the right people and unsubscribes hostile responses automatically.

Built under contract for a venture in the UK accountancy sector and currently in its final stages of development. I can discuss the engineering and results in depth, and arrange access, with serious enquiries.

Earlier highlights

Handle Social

CTO and lead developer on a proprietary social-media engagement platform, comparable in scope to Hootsuite or Sprout Social, taken from proof of concept to a production-ready product with an international team.

London Square

Lead developer on a property website shortlisted for Best Corporate Website at the Property Marketing Awards, alongside names such as The Shard and Candy & Candy. Buyers could pan and zoom interactive floor plans of homes still under construction.

Ford.co.uk 3D car configurator

Led the 3D vehicle build for Ford's configurator via Wunderman's studio Burrows. By scripting the asset pipeline, I turned roughly 80 hours of manual production into under 10 minutes, freeing the animators to do the creative work.

Landmark Lofts

Rebuilt the company website around its single most-asked question, "which similar projects have you managed near us?", telling the stories of 1,500-plus completed projects and lifting visitors, engagement and conversions well beyond previous levels.

Experience

A mix of full-time senior roles and independent work. Between permanent positions, and often alongside them, I have taken on client contracts and built my own products, always shipping from proof of concept to production.

2025 to present

Independent Senior Engineer, Contract

Designing and building secure, performant web and mobile platforms for a select portfolio of clients. Current contracts, both in their final stages, include Buy/Sell/Merge, an M&A practitioner platform, and Nosey, a property-viewing assistant, built alongside my own product Gobi Social. Remote.

Jan to Feb 2025

Senior Software Engineer, HealthBoxHR (Contract)

A focused contract building an inference-based redaction engine that identifies sensitive attributes hidden in contextual data, with decoupled processing through Laravel observers and listeners triggering background PDF manipulation via Node.js micro-services. Remote.

2022 to 2024

Senior Software Engineer, Kamma (Full-time)

One of the architects behind Kamma's PropTech platform, building performant, scalable infrastructure over a trillion-record PostGIS data engine. Delivered Laravel and Vue/React products and SaaS APIs, spearheaded a standalone app for the ReapitCRM marketplace, built partner SDKs, and created a retrofit and energy-efficiency tool that turns abstract EPC data into an actionable roadmap. My work supported Kamma's "Best ESG Data Provider" recognition and its Green Homes Finance Accelerator funding. Remote.

2019 to 2022

Freelance Laravel Engineer, Gobi Social

Designing and building Gobi Social, my own social discovery and matching platform, on the TALL and Vue stack: a purpose-agnostic matching engine, an event-driven service layer and real-time features, from concept towards production. Remote.

2019

CTO, Handle Social

Technical lead and CTO for a proprietary social-media engagement platform comparable in scope to Hootsuite or Sprout Social, spanning scheduling, audience targeting, analytics and cross-network publishing, taken from proof of concept towards production with an international team.

2016 to 2019

Independent Web Developer

Self-employed, building custom CRM, CMS and SaaS applications across the fintech and data-tech sectors, with secure payment flows and OAuth2 API integrations. Remote.

2014 to 2016

Head of Digital Development, Landmark Group (Full-time)

Split between building a bespoke project-management mobile app on a Laravel API and leading a small team of developers and content creators across the group's brands.

2012 to 2014

Lead Web Application Developer, Pixelwork

Led design and build for clients including Amnesty International, RSPB, the Royal Opera House, Barings and DP World, working within an Agile framework and shipping the award-shortlisted London Square site.

2011 to 2012

Lead Web Application Developer, Acumen Design

Front-end and back-end development for clients including UK Trade & Investment, Ofcom and Goldsmiths, with a modular CMS that unified web content, social media and email marketing.

2004 to 2011

Owner & Lead Developer, Polygonsoup

Ran my own digital studio building bespoke web applications and interactive 3D, with clients including Ford (via Wunderman and Burrows), the BBC, SAIC and Cabot Square Capital.

1986 to 2004

Games artist & animator

Where it started. A BAFTA-nominated children's game and the graphics for the world's first age-certified computer game. The instinct for systems, performance and craft was forged here.

Writing & posts

I write about engineering judgement, AI in software, and how good products actually get built. The running archive lives on LinkedIn; these are some pieces I am happy to be read by.

Portfolio Deep-Dives

Recognition

A creative force majeure with huge talent and ability in both design and development, as agile in thought as he is insightful in design. Jayenne draws on his broad knowledge, experience and inspiration to deliver strong solutions on brief, in terms of both the client's needs and the user's experience.

Ray, Creative Director, Acumen Design