Software Engineer

Job Title: Software Engineer Location: Birmingham / Hybrid Salary: £32,000 - £45,000 per annum Position: Permanent, full-time About The Company: The Company is a long-established web and app development agency based in the Jewellery Quarter, specialising in AI integration, SaaS products, apps and portals. Job Role: This is a hands-on, mid-level Software Engineer role with responsibility for delivering complete features and projects. You will work independently with light oversight from a Lead Engineer, delivering projects with a moderate level of technical risk or substantial parts of larger projects. You will own your work from the initial ticket through to a working, supportable feature in production. You will make technical decisions within your area of responsibility and judge when to seek a second opinion. You will raise higher-risk and architecture-level decisions with your lead early, bringing options and a recommendation. Your lead will support you with project-level technical risk. The role has no people-management responsibilities. You are encouraged to support junior engineers informally, while remaining focused on the quality, reliability and clarity of your own work. Your responsibilities Deliver features that are working, tested, documented and in use. Check for defects or unexpected behaviour after delivery and follow through without needing reminders. Make technical decisions that balance maintainability, security, performance and the client's needs. Understand which decisions you can make, which need your lead's input and which require further escalation. Identify risks and trade-offs early. Explain the current position, the impact on the project, what is already handled and what remains unresolved. Bring a proposed course of action so your lead can confirm, adjust or step in, and raise problems while there is still time to act. Build full-stack web and mobile applications, typically involving React Native, SQL-backed APIs and AWS hosting. Be comfortable working in the framework or language each project requires. Write clean, tested, well-structured code that follows team standards. Work collaboratively through Git, pull requests and CI/CD pipelines. Use AI-assisted tools to improve speed and quality. Review and validate their output, taking responsibility for the software you deliver. Keep your lead and project manager informed about progress, implications, resolved and outstanding issues, and any support or decisions you need. Explain technical choices clearly to project managers and, where needed, clients. Document decisions, context and operational knowledge so another engineer can pick up your work without relying on your memory. Identify recurring problems and suggest changes that prevent them. Put practical improvements in place within your area, such as checklists, clearer standards, tests, automation or better ticket templates. Contribute to better tickets, estimates, refinement and delivery flow. Apply lessons from retrospectives to your work. Keep clear ownership, a dated next step, any required decision or escalation, and a backup plan for the work you own. Resolve issues affecting your delivery or make clear who needs to take responsibility. Explain the trade-offs you chose as well as the constraints you faced when reporting on your work.Experience and capabilities You will need: Commercial programming experience consistent with a mid-level engineer, with evidence of delivering features or parts of projects from start to finish. Solid capability in an object-oriented back-end language, with PHP/Laravel strongly preferred, and a modern front-end framework such as React or React Native. TypeScript is desirable. Good working knowledge of SQL and relational database design, and an understanding of MVC and RESTful API principles. Familiarity with Git-based team workflows, code review, automated testing and CI/CD. The ability to solve complex problems and become effective quickly with unfam