Independent Contractor Web Developer Jobs in Florida

Senior Web Developer

We're looking for a Senior Web Developer to take ownership of the websites across our brand portfolio, reporting to the Digital Marketing Director. You'll be the most senior and technical voice for our web presence; building, maintaining, and continually improving each site, setting development standards across the portfolio, and formulating on how new sites get built. Our preferred stack is Next.js on the front end with a headless CMS powering content, and you'll help shape that direction going forward. You'll work closely with our internal marketing team, leadership, and in-house designers, with minimal need to coordinate outside vendors. You'll partner with our Director of IT and VP of AI on hosting, security, and AI tooling (our infrastructure will run behind Cloudflare). Domain management is handled separately. The portfolio will keep growing as the company adds new brands, and this role will grow with it.

Essential Responsibilities:

• Own the build, upkeep, and continuous improvement of every website in the company's portfolio and set the technical standards other work is measured against.
• Build new sites using Next.js paired with a headless CMS and lead the setup/configuration of the CMS for each new site.
• Drive decisions on when and how to migrate existing sites to our Next.js + headless CMS stack and evaluate new tools or platforms as the portfolio grows.
• Translate priorities from internal marketing, leadership, and in-house design stakeholders into a technical roadmap across multiple brands and provide informed recommendations when needed.
• Monitor site performance and ensure 99.9% uptime; independently diagnose and resolve complex, site-level issues.
• Keep content management systems, plugins, themes, and dependencies current and secure across all sites.
• Optimize sites for speed, mobile responsiveness, accessibility, and work with our SEO specialist. Together, you will execute SEO and AEO best practices and establish reusable patterns/components to keep this consistent across the portfolio.
• Partner with the Director of IT on hosting, Cloudflare configuration, and site security architecture.
• Partner day-to-day with internal marketing, leadership, and in-house designers to translate business needs into working websites. This is a fully in-house function with minimal outside vendor involvement.
• Work with the VP of AI to define how AI coding tools/assistants get used across the development workflow, and model that usage for future hires.
• Stand up new websites, including CMS architecture and setup, as additional brands and properties are added to the portfolio.
• Set and maintain documentation, coding standards, and best practices for web development across all properties, with an eye toward mentoring future developers as the team grows.

Qualifications & Abilities:

• 5+ years of professional experience building and maintaining production websites, including experience owning projects independently end to end.
• Strong, demonstrated experience building with React/Next.js, and the judgment to make architecture-level decisions, not just implement them.
• Solid experience working with a headless CMS (Strapi or similar) to model content and power a decoupled front end, including standing up new CMS instances from scratch.
• Proven ability to manage multiple, concurrent projects across different brands with minimal oversight.
• Strong working knowledge of SEO fundamentals, site performance optimization, and web security best practices.
• Experience with version control (Git) and modern development workflows, including using AI coding assistants effectively.
• Strong design sense and attention to detail and able to keep each brand's look and voice consistent across a growing portfolio.
• Excellent communication skills and comfort operating as the senior technical point of contact for non-technical stakeholders, including leadership.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with e-commerce or booking/reservation functionality (hospitality-related sites).
• Familiarity with backend languages/frameworks (Node.js or similar) and cloud hosting (AWS or similar).
• Prior experience mentoring junior developers or setting technical direction for a team.
• Prior experience supporting multiple brands or a multi-site/multi-property portfolio.
• Claude, Anthropic, AEO, and vibe coding experience.