PHP developer

A PHP developer architects, codes and maintains server-side logic for web apps. They design database schemas, write clean PHP integrating HTML, CSS, JavaScript, configure Apache/Nginx, manage version control with Git, and leverage frameworks like Laravel or Symfony to speed development. Daily, they debug, log errors, optimize queries, ensure security via input validation, CSRF/XSS protection, run unit tests, document APIs, deploy releases and collaborate with designers, PMs and DevOps. Improve!!

Нанять исполнителя

Advantages of outstaffing %title%

Immediate access to vetted PHP expertise

Flexible scaling of development capacity without long-term commitments

Reduced recruitment, onboarding, and training costs

Faster project kick-off and shortened time-to-market

Seamless integration with existing internal teams and processes

Coverage of specific skill gaps (frameworks, legacy code, performance tuning)

Lower operational overhead for HR, payroll, and benefits management

Easy knowledge transfer to in-house developers during collaboration

Option to evaluate talent before offering full-time positions

Ability to maintain continuous development through distributed time zones

Mastered in

Composer

Streamlines PHP dependency management for scalability

PHPStorm

Intelligent IDE accelerating PHP coding productivity

Laravel

Elegant framework boosting rapid PHP application development

Xdebug

Powerful debugger enhancing PHP code insight

Portfolios

OmniCMS

Scalable headless content management framework.

CommerceEdge

High-volume, resilient transactional e-commerce engine.

NexusAPI

Secure REST and GraphQL API gateway.

PulseChat

Low-latency WebSocket chat service backbone.

InsightFlow

Real-time analytics and KPI dashboard platform.

Reviews

Smartbrain delivered a senior Laravel/PHP developer in 6 days—shattering our usual 4-week cycle. Their pre-vetted hire plugged into our LAMP stack shipping portal with zero rework, tuned sluggish MySQL queries, and cut page load 38%. Streamlined Slack onboarding freed HR to focus on retention.

Emily Carver

HR Professional

Horizon Fleet Logistics

Our fintech dashboard was stuck on legacy Symfony 3. Smartbrain’s contract PHP engineer upgraded us to 5.4, refactored 12k lines to PSR-4, and wired in PHPUnit coverage. Velocity jumped 25% and my squad could chase new REST API features instead of drowning in technical debt.

Marcus Hill

Dev Team Lead

SilverPeak Software LLC

I feared outsourcing, yet Smartbrain matched us with a CodeIgniter guru who grasped our ERP quirks. He meshed with the in-house C# crew, shipped a PHP microservice in two sprints, and trimmed order-processing time 40%. Quality soared while my ops team finally breathed.

Olivia Chen

CEO

GroveCraft Manufacturing

Smartbrain’s remote PHP squad grabbed our WordPress/WooCommerce backlog in a week. Composer scripts, shared Git flow, and crisp Loom walkthroughs meant zero downtime. Storefront pages now post 95+ Lighthouse scores, letting designers craft UX instead of chasing PHP bugs.

Daniel Brooks

Owner

Sierra Ridge Media

Filling niche PHP-MySQL roles for HIPAA apps used to drag for months. Smartbrain surfaced three secure-coding pros in 72 hrs. The hire slotted into our Kanban board day one, automated audit logging, and cut compliance review hours 30%, easing the load on devs and auditors alike.

Heather Lopez

HR Professional

Crestline Health Tech

Tech Stacks

LAMP Stack

LAMP remains the classic baseline PHP stack: Linux for the operating system, Apache for the web server, MySQL for relational storage, and PHP as the scripting language. It is favored for its maturity, giant community, and ubiquitous hosting support. Developers appreciate straightforward .htaccess routing, mod_php simplicity, and abundant documentation. Modern incarnations swap MySQL for MariaDB or Percona and enable HTTPS with Let’s Encrypt effortlessly. Tooling such as phpMyAdmin, Composer, and Git integrates smoothly. Continuous-integration servers, Docker images, and configuration management recipes abound, letting teams replicate predictable environments locally and in production with minimal cost. Its learning curve stays refreshingly gentle.

LEMP Stack

LEMP trades Apache for Nginx and mod_php for PHP-FPM, delivering leaner memory footprints and higher concurrency while preserving the familiar Linux, MySQL, and PHP triad. FastCGI process management separates application execution from web serving, allowing zero-downtime reloads and granular tuning. HTTP/2, reverse-proxy caching, and WebSocket support are first-class citizens, making the stack popular among high-traffic PHP applications such as SaaS dashboards and APIs. sysadmins provision servers using tools like Ansible and Terraform, then containerize workloads with Docker or Kubernetes. Migrating from LAMP usually involves reconfiguring virtual hosts and updating .htaccess directives to Nginx rewrite rules for optimal performance and security.

Laravel + Vue.js

Laravel plus Vue.js offers a modern full-stack development experience prized by PHP engineers who want expressive backends and reactive frontends without abandoning familiar tooling. Laravel contributes elegant routing, Eloquent ORM, queues, and Blade templating, while Vue.js handles componentized user interfaces, real-time updates, and state management through Vuex or Pinia. The framework’s built-in Mix wrapper around Vite or Webpack streamlines asset builds, and Sail provides Docker-based local environments. Sanctum and Passport supply token authentication, enabling seamless single-page applications or mobile API consumption. Community packages, vibrant documentation, and cloud services like Laravel Forge and Vapor accelerate deployment, scaling, and monitoring tasks effortlessly.

Symfony + API Platform

Symfony paired with API Platform creates an enterprise-grade stack focused on standards compliance, testability, and rich API ecosystems. Symfony’s modular components, autowiring, and robust event dispatcher encourage clean architecture, while Doctrine ORM or ODM handles persistence. API Platform automates REST and GraphQL endpoint generation, documentation through OpenAPI, pagination, serialization, and security fences. Combined, they let developers prototype hypermedia services quickly yet remain fully customizable. Mercure delivers real-time push, and Messenger orchestrates asynchronous queues over RabbitMQ or Kafka. Professional tooling—Flex, Maker, Encore, PHPUnit, Psalm—boosts productivity. The stack excels in microservice landscapes, headless CMS backends, and data-heavy B2B integrations across diverse industries.

WordPress + WooCommerce

WordPress with WooCommerce forms the de facto PHP stack for content-driven e-commerce sites, delivering rapid time-to-market and a nontechnical admin experience. WordPress’s plugin ecosystem, Gutenberg block editor, and REST API enable flexible page building, while WooCommerce layers catalog management, cart logic, and payment gateway integrations. Developers extend functionality using hooks, filters, and custom post types, or build headless storefronts exposing GraphQL via WPGraphQL. Common tooling includes Advanced Custom Fields, Yoast SEO, and WP-CLI for scripted operations. Performance is improved with object caching, CDN offloading, and Nginx or LiteSpeed servers. Managed hosts and one-click scaling services ease operational burdens for merchants.

Decoupled Drupal

Decoupled Drupal combines Drupal’s mature CMS backend with a JavaScript front-end, often React, to produce scalable, content-rich applications managed by PHP developers collaborating seamlessly with frontend teams. Drupal supplies revisions, multilingual workflows, custom entity types, and fine-grained permissions, exposed through JSON:API or GraphQL modules. The React layer, sometimes bootstrapped with Next.js, fetches content over these APIs, enabling static generation, server-side rendering, or SPA behavior. This architecture separates concerns, enhancing performance, security, and developer autonomy. Tools like Drupal’s Composer scaffolding, Drush, and Lando streamline local setups, while Acquia, Pantheon, or Kubernetes manage staging pipelines, automated tests, and blue-green deployments for reliability.

Shortlist

Alexei Petrov

Senior PHP / Laravel & Symfony Developer

Senior PHP craftsman with 8+ years designing feature-rich SaaS backbones for finance and logistics. Alexei has steered green-field and rescue projects on Laravel, Symfony, Slim and a sprinkling of Go for critical paths, championing SOLID, hexagonal architecture and 95 % unit-test coverage. At FinCore he decomposed a 450-k-line monolith into 18 Dockerised services, introducing RabbitMQ, OpenAPI 3 and GitHub Actions that trimmed release cycles from fortnightly to daily. Performance geek: uses Blackfire, New Relic and hand-rolled profiling to shave 40 % off CPU time and cut AWS bills by €7 k/quarter. Comfortable across the stack—Vue, TypeScript, Tailwind, Storybook—yet happiest perfecting domain layers and writing RFC-level documentation. Holds AWS Developer Associate and Scrum PSM-I. Leads a guild of five, runs code-review dojo sessions and has mentored two interns into mid-level roles. Available for hybrid or remote roles within CET ±2. Fluent English (C1), native Russian. Motivated by complex domains, clean feedback loops and teams that pair often. Autogenerate: GitHub github.com/alexpetrov (4 k★), Packagist 3 m downloads, Stack Overflow 32 k rep, last updated 2025-07-06.

Nathan Clarke

Lead Full-Stack PHP Engineer

Seasoned full-stack engineer who has lived through three PHP major versions and loved every migration. Nathan currently owns the payments platform at TicketHive where 60+ micro-services—written in PHP-8.3, Kotlin and Rust—settle €120 m annually. Laravel Octane, RoadRunner and Swoole keep latencies <75 ms while Redis Streams and Kafka glue the event mesh. He architects with DDD, CQRS and Event Sourcing, documents with ADRs, and tests with Pest & Cypress. Former Ops hand, he bakes observability (OTel, Grafana) and GitOps pipelines into every repo. Authored an internal package that wraps feature flags and A/B testing; now open-sourced and trending on Packagist. Loves pair-programming, hates hidden work-in-progress, speaks at PHP-UK and local meetups. Autogenerate: GitHub github.com/nathclarke (6 k★), Medium blog 1.2 m reads, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, created 11 Composer libraries, data current as of 2025-07-06.

Rahul Menon

Backend PHP API Specialist

Rahul builds fault-tolerant APIs that never blink. In six years at HealthSync he rewrote legacy CakePHP into PSR-12 compliant Laravel 10, introducing Swagger first-contracts, JWT/OAuth2, and zero-downtime deploys via Blue/Green ECS clusters. Daily responsibilities span schema design in MySQL & Aurora, Redis caching, asynchronous jobs in Horizon and data pipelines that push anonymised metrics to Redshift. Security conscious: CISSP-trained, runs SAST/DAST, and leads regular threat-model workshops. Mentors QA on API-testing with Postman and k6. Comfortable refactoring under coverage: PHPUnit, php-stan level max, sonar metrics green for 18 months. When off duty he contributes to open-source healthcare HL7 adapters. Autogenerate: GitHub github.com/rahulmenon (3.5 k★), Speaker at LaravelLive India 2024, AWS DevOps Pro in progress, generated 2025-07-06.

Diego Fernández

Principal PHP / Symfony Architect

Diego blends business insight with code precision. As principal engineer at AgroTech he leads a squad modernising farm-management tools from Zend2 to Symfony 7, orchestrating a GraphQL gateway that now handles 4 m queries/day. Introduced Clean Architecture, modular monorepos and Makefile-driven DX that cut onboarding from 10 days to 3. Evangelist for static analysis (Psalm) and mutation testing (Infection). Writes ADRs, records loom-based walkthroughs and pushes for blameless post-mortems. Hands-on with Terraform, EKS and ArgoCD ensuring infra drifts are caught early. Enjoys shaping roadmaps alongside product managers and has coached four PO’s on technical feasibility. Autogenerate: GitHub github.com/diegofernandez (5 k★), Certified Scrum Product Owner, Spanish native / English B2, profile generated 2025-07-06.

Omar Hassan

Scalable Systems PHP Engineer

Polyglot backend engineer whose PHP origins date back to PHP5 but whose mindset is 2025. Omar scaled the notifications engine at RideLoop from 0 to 50 k req/s using Laravel Octane, Redis Streams and WebSockets over Centrifugo. Pioneered trunk-based dev, feature toggles and contract tests that unlocked 30+ deploys per day. Bridges teams: collaborates smoothly with Android/iOS on API versions, sits with UX to streamline flows and writes post-incident comics that people actually read. Loves performance fires—uses XHProf, flame graphs and Sentry to root-cause within minutes. Enjoys pair-mob sessions, book clubs and hack-days. Autogenerate: GitHub github.com/omarhassan (2.8 k★), Flutter side projects, GCP PCA certified, CV autogenerated 2025-07-06.

Julien Lefèvre

Senior PHP Developer & Tech Lead

Julien is the dev you call when you need legacy PHP to sing or a fresh stack to gleam. At MediaPulse he orchestrated a 14-service refactor from WordPress spaghetti to Laravel Nova powered CMS, leveraging Elasticsearch, Horizon queues and CloudFront CDN to triple page performance. Passionate about domain events, tactical design patterns and sharing knowledge—he runs internal Kata Fridays and the Paris PHP meetup. Brings product empathy: studied UX before CS, often prototypes in Figma. Toolbelt includes PHPUnit, Behat, Cypress, Terraform, Kubernetes and a healthy dose of Makefiles. Finds calm in CI green ticks and Terraform plans with zero diff. Autogenerate: GitHub github.com/jlef (4.4 k★), conference talk “From Monolith to Modular” PHP-Day Verona 2024, English C1, French native, generated 2025-07-06.

Dev augmentation service

Rapid Team Scaling

Developer augmentation lets you quickly add experienced PHP engineers whenever workloads spike, eliminating lengthy recruitment cycles.

Cost Efficiency

You pay only for the talent and hours you need, lowering overhead costs tied to full-time salaries, benefits, and long onboarding processes.

Access to Specialized Skills

Augmentation services provide PHP developers with niche expertise—frameworks, legacy migrations, performance tuning—without a permanent hire.

Reduced Hiring Risk

Try-before-you-commit engagements let you evaluate developers’ fit and output before considering long-term contracts or full-time offers.

Accelerated Delivery

With extra PHP hands on deck, sprints close faster, backlogs shrink, and product releases reach market sooner, boosting competitive edge.

Focus on Core Business Goals

Delegating coding capacity to augmented PHP specialists frees internal teams to concentrate on strategy, innovation, and revenue-driving tasks.

Domain expertise

Web stores, digital marketplaces, payment gateways and inventory systems heavily rely on PHP frameworks such as Magento, WooCommerce and Laravel to power product catalogs, checkout flows and order management.

News portals, blogs, streaming sites and digital magazines use PHP-based CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla to manage large volumes of content and high-traffic websites.

B2B and B2C SaaS products such as CRM, project management, marketing automation and analytics dashboards often adopt PHP back-ends (Laravel, Symfony) for rapid development and scalable REST APIs.

Banks, payment processors and financial startups leverage PHP to implement secure transaction APIs, customer portals and integrations with gateways such as Stripe, PayPal and Braintree.

Why hire with us

Immediate access to pre-vetted PHP talent without lengthy recruitment cycles

Flexible scaling of developer capacity up or down based on project load

Cost efficiency by paying only for the hours or sprints actually worked

Faster time-to-market thanks to developers who are already onboarded to agile processes

Knowledge transfer from seasoned PHP specialists to in-house teams

Reduced HR, payroll, and administrative overhead compared with direct hires

24/7 development coverage through globally distributed augmentation teams

Lower risk of project delays due to quick replacement or addition of resources

Built-in quality assurance and code review procedures provided by the augmentation vendor

Ability to focus internal staff on core business initiatives while augmented developers handle feature delivery

What core technical skills should I prioritize when hiring a PHP developer?

Look for solid understanding of PHP 7/8, OOP principles, experience with MVC frameworks (Laravel, Symfony), proficiency in SQL/NoSQL databases, familiarity with RESTful API design, and knowledge of testing and CI/CD pipelines.

How can I evaluate a candidate’s proficiency with a PHP framework like Laravel or Symfony?

You can review past projects built with the framework, ask the candidate to explain how they solved specific problems, give a short coding exercise that uses key framework features (routing, ORM, middleware), and discuss best practices and common pitfalls within the framework.

Why is experience with version control important for a PHP developer?

Version control experience, especially with Git, is critical because it enables collaboration, code review, CI/CD automation, and rollback of changes. A developer who understands branching strategies and pull requests will integrate smoothly into modern workflows.

What questions reveal whether a PHP developer understands web security best practices?

Ask about how they mitigate common PHP security issues—SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, session hijacking. Look for knowledge of prepared statements, output escaping, secure cookie handling, and the proper use of framework security features.

What is a typical salary range for PHP developers at different experience levels?

Salaries vary by region, experience, and stack, but as a rough guide: junior PHP developers earn $50–70k, mid-level $70–100k, and senior or specialized roles (e.g., Laravel architects) can reach $100–140k+ in U.S. markets. Adjust for cost of living and remote work options.