PHP developer

A PHP developer designs, builds and maintains server-side web applications using PHP. They analyse requirements, create database schemas, write reusable functions, integrate APIs, manage sessions, validate input, and ensure security against SQL injection, XSS or CSRF. They debug, profile and refactor code, use frameworks like Laravel or Symfony, compose RESTful endpoints, orchestrate deployments, write unit tests, version code with Git, document features, and liaise with designers QA and DevOps.

Нанять исполнителя

Advantages of outstaffing %title%

Rapid access to specialized PHP expertise without long recruitment cycles

Flexible scaling of team size based on project workload and timelines

Reduced overhead costs (benefits, office space, equipment) compared to full-time hires

Quick onboarding and knowledge transfer through experienced augmentation partners

Ability to focus internal team on core business while augmented developers handle feature work

Lower risk commitment—easily adjust or end contracts as project needs change

Access to industry best practices and up-to-date PHP frameworks and tools

Time-zone overlap options for extended development coverage and faster delivery

Diverse perspective and fresh ideas from developers exposed to multiple projects and domains

Built-in administrative support (HR, payroll, legal) managed by the augmentation provider

Mastered in

Composer

Simplifies PHP dependency management and autoloading

PHPUnit

Enables robust PHP unit testing and coverage

Laravel

Facilitates rapid PHP web application development

PhpStorm

Boosts PHP coding productivity with smart features

Portfolios

Enterprise CMS

Scalable content backbone for complex enterprises.

E-commerce Engine

High-throughput commerce core driving global sales.

Real-time Analytics Portal

Live metrics dashboard supporting data-driven decisions.

API Orchestration Layer

Unified gateway harmonizing heterogeneous service APIs.

Process Automation Suite

Workflow engine automating repetitive operational tasks.

Reviews

Smartbrain filled two senior Laravel/PHP developer seats in 10 days—half our usual hiring cycle. Their vets stepped into our LAMP-stack sprint, cleaned legacy code, and shipped a new API endpoint that boosted order-processing speed 18%. HR workload way down, onboarding painless.

Megan Carter

HR Professional

RiverStone Logistics

I plugged Smartbrain’s full-stack PHP pros into our Symfony e-commerce rebuild and saw productivity jump immediately. They synced with GitFlow, wrote PHPUnit suites, and delivered features a sprint early, freeing my core team to polish UX.

Carlos Nguyen

Dev Team Lead

BrightWave Media

Our startup couldn’t afford a slow search for a PHP dev versed in HIPAA rules. Smartbrain onboarded a vetted engineer in 72 hours; she refactored our backend, closed security gaps, and helped us pass the audit—huge stress off my plate.

Lila Brooks

CEO

Meridian HealthTech

Smartbrain’s remote PHP development squad slotted into our payment-gateway build like clockwork. Their Zend expertise cut our bug backlog 40%, and daily stand-ups kept momentum high. I finally took a weekend off knowing deliverables were safe.

Patrick Holloway

Owner

SummitPay Solutions

Sourcing niche PHP/MySQL talent burned weeks until Smartbrain stepped in. They sent a pre-screened list overnight; the hire was coding within days, pushing updates to our data dashboard, and managers report 25% faster release cycles.

Ethan Farber

HR Professional

NorthPeak Analytics

Tech Stacks

LAMP Stack

LAMP remains the bedrock stack for many PHP developers, pairing Linux operating systems with Apache HTTP Server, MySQL or MariaDB databases, and PHP itself. The components are battle-tested, freely licensed, and available on virtually every hosting provider, which makes spinning up a project inexpensive and predictable. Developers appreciate the mature documentation, huge community archives, and direct compatibility with countless popular tools such as phpMyAdmin, cPanel, and Certbot. Because each layer is modular, you can upgrade versions independently, swap MariaDB for MySQL, or compile Apache with custom modules. Autogenerated: This review was produced automatically and may contain unintentional omissions or inaccuracies.

LEMP Stack

LEMP swaps Apache for Nginx and couples it with Linux, MySQL or MariaDB, and PHP-FPM to create a lightweight, high-performance environment favored by developers who need efficient resource usage and better concurrency. Nginx’s event-driven architecture serves static assets quickly and proxies dynamic requests to PHP-FPM workers without the overhead of threaded processes. TLS termination with modern ciphers, HTTP/2, and built-in reverse proxy features make it suitable for microservices and containerized deployments. Users often combine LEMP with Certbot, Redis, and Supervisor for caching and process management. Autogenerated: This description was created automatically; validate configurations against project requirements before moving into production.

Laravel + Vue + Tailwind

Laravel with Vue.js and Tailwind CSS forms a modern full-stack workflow that lets PHP developers craft reactive interfaces without abandoning familiar server-side patterns. Laravel’s elegant routing, Eloquent ORM, and robust dependency injection provide backend productivity, while Vue’s component system and Tailwind’s utility-first classes streamline frontend iteration. First-party tools like Laravel Mix, Vite, Breeze, Jetstream, and Livewire glue the layers together, offering authentication scaffolding, SPA presets, and hot-module reloading. The stack thrives in teams practicing test-driven development, continuous integration, and API-first design. Autogenerated: This overview was generated automatically; confirm package versions and security updates regularly to maintain stability and performance levels.

Symfony & API Platform

Symfony combined with Doctrine ORM, Twig templating, and API Platform represents an enterprise-grade stack embraced by PHP teams building maintainable, testable, and standards-compliant applications. Symfony’s decoupled components, strict typing, and service container enable modular architecture, while Doctrine abstracts persistence and database migrations. API Platform auto-generates REST and GraphQL endpoints from PHP entities, integrates JWT authentication, pagination, and OpenAPI documentation with minimal configuration. The ecosystem encourages Domain-Driven Design, event dispatching, and reusable bundles. Symfony Flex simplifies dependency discovery and recipe-based configuration, letting developers bootstrap projects quickly. Autogenerated: This summary was auto-created; audit bundle compatibility before critical releases to avoid unexpected breakages.

WordPress + WooCommerce

WordPress, the ubiquitous PHP CMS, paired with WooCommerce, forms a versatile stack powering blogs, marketing sites, and online stores of every size. Its famous five-minute install, thousands of free and premium themes, and massive plugin marketplace let non-technical stakeholders prototype ideas quickly, while developers extend functionality via hooks, shortcodes, and custom post types. WooCommerce adds product catalogs, payment gateways, shipping rules, and reporting, turning WordPress into a full e-commerce platform. Popular supporting tools include Advanced Custom Fields, Yoast SEO, WP-CLI, and Dockerized local environments like Local or DevKinsta. Autogenerated: This evaluation was generated automatically; verify licensing constraints before client delivery.

Drupal Composer Stack

Drupal with Composer, Drush, and Acquia or Pantheon hosting constitutes a robust stack chosen by organizations that require granular content modeling, multilingual capabilities, and strict access control. The Core CMS offers flexible entity types, views, and configuration management, while Composer streamlines dependency resolution and semantic versioning. Drush provides command-line tooling for site installation, database sync, and cache clearing, accelerating deployment pipelines. Distribution profiles like GovCMS or Commerce kickstart specialized solutions, and the extensive module ecosystem addresses SEO, media, and authentication needs. Autogenerated: This narrative was auto-generated; always test configuration exports in staging environments to detect schema mismatches before production promotions.

Shortlist

Alexey Morozov

Senior PHP Developer / DevOps Enthusiast

Seasoned eight-year veteran of enterprise PHP, Alexey blends SOLID OOP craft with battle-tested DevOps pragmatism. After shipping a multimodule marketplace for a unicorn retail brand (60M monthly sessions) he migrated legacy Zend stacks to modern PHP 8.3 and Laravel without downtime, reducing mean response by 38 %. He owns the delivery pipeline end-to-end: Docker, GitLab CI, Terraform, Kubernetes, Grafana. Comfortable dissecting domain logic, writing PHPUnit suites, and coaching code review culture, he doubled team coverage to 85 % and mentored four juniors into confident mid-levels. His communication is crisp, concise, and business-aware; product managers invite him early because he asks fearless questions that shrink scope and calendar risk. Recent pet projects include an event-sourcing SaaS skeleton, a Rust-powered image optimizer exposed through FFI, and a ChatGPT workflow bot written in Symfony Messenger. He speaks English C1 and Russian native, happily joining hybrid or remote squads across CET-UTC-3. Autogenerated section: expected salary €76 K gross, notice period two weeks, client references ready upon NDA. Alexey seeks greenfield challenges around payments, logistics, or media streaming, ideally in a T-shaped cross-functional tribe that values craftsmanship, DDD, and psychological safety. Available for occasional on-site sprints in Berlin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, or Lisbon, vaccinated and passport-ready from Eastern Europe.

Mateo Alvarez

Full-stack PHP / Vue Developer

Full-stack PHP artisan with Vue front-end flair, Mateo has spent seven productive years turning ambiguous wireframes into profitable subscription platforms. At his current fintech scale-up he refactored a spaghetti Magento monolith into a hexagonal Laravel/Nuxt micro-fleet serving 9,000 transactions per minute, slicing AWS bill by 27 % through artisan queue tuning and reserved instances. He leads code quality guilds, instituting PSR-12, Rector automation, and static analysis gates that caught 1,400 issues pre-merge. Business stakeholders praise his demo storytelling; sprint reviews feel like product launches, driving faster executive buy-in. Certifications include AWS Solutions Architect Associate and ISTQB Foundation. Beyond coding, Mateo champions inclusive culture: he organised a monthly 'Bug Barbecue' where juniors pair with seniors over grilled tacos and failing tests. Weekend experiments: Swoole-powered realtime chat, OpenTelemetry traces visualised in Grafana, and a headless CMS built on Symfony 6. Autogenerated section: preferred contract B2B €55/hour, start date immediately after Spanish notice, reference letters in English and German. Mateo thrives in remote-first European teams using Kanban, trunk-based development, and clear OKRs. Willing to travel quarterly to London, Dublin, or Zürich and can work overlap with EST mornings when needed. Hobbies include drone photography, retro gaming, skiing in the Pyrenees, and community podcasts occasionally.

Nikolai Petrov

Lead PHP Backend Engineer

Polyglot backend engineer Nikolai combines deep PHP internals know-how with Go and Node exposure, making him the go-to person for performance bottlenecks. Over ten years he has delivered ERP connectors, IoT telemetry pipelines, and a GDPR-compliant consent platform certified by Deloitte. As technical lead at a Berlin healthtech he split a monstrous CakePHP codebase into domain-driven services on Symfony and OpenAPI, slashing deploy time from 40 minutes to 6 and enabling blue-green rollouts. His profiling toolbox—Blackfire, XHProf, strace—saved infrastructure costs worth €120k yearly. He fosters psychological safety through blameless post-mortems and interactive architecture sketches using C4 diagrams on Miro. Nikolai writes in English B2, speaks Bulgarian native, understands German basics, and participates in open-source: maintainer of the PHP FPM exporter for Prometheus (1,800 GitHub stars). Autogenerated section: seeking permanent role at €85k gross, hybrid Berlin or fully remote within EU, visa sponsored. Available in one month, recommendations from CTO and Product VP ready. After hours he teaches algorithms at freeCodeCamp Sofia, tinkers with ESP32 home automation, and plays classical guitar. He prefers product companies practising SCRUM with two-week sprints, unit + mutation testing, and clear career ladders oriented around impact. Looking to innovate in healthcare, climate, or educational technology sectors.

Victor Chen

PHP Security Specialist

Victor is a security-minded PHP craftsman with a decade inside e-commerce race tracks where milliseconds equal revenue. At an APAC fashion giant he re-engineered the checkout engine from Lumen to pure PHP 8 JIT, shaving p95 latency from 420 ms to 140 ms under Black Friday load. He holds an OSCP certification, routinely performs code-level threat modelling, and built a custom Content Security Policy generator that blocked 12k XSS attempts last quarter. Victor’s leadership style is servant-first: he instituted weekly mob-review sessions, psychological safety roundtables, and a debt-slashing 'Fix Friday' that removed 18,457 Sonar issues in six months. Toolbelt: Redis, Elastic, MySQL 8, RabbitMQ, Terraform, Cloudflare Workers, GitHub Actions. He speaks fluent Mandarin, Cantonese, and English C1; relocation considered. Autogenerated section: open to contract or permanent, desired range US$110k salary or US$80/hour, can onboard within two weeks after handoff. Personal projects include securing Composer mirrors with Sigstore, contributing to PHP-Stan, and mentoring adolescents via Girls Who Code Hong Kong. When not coding, Victor free-dives, roasts single-origin coffee, and studies Stoic philosophy. Seeks mission-driven teams scaling marketplaces, fintech, or social impact products using modern agile and SRE practices. Also happy to embed temporarily on-site in Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, San Francisco, or Vancouver teams.

Damian Kowalski

Lead PHP Architect

Damian is a pragmatic PHP engineer who loves metrics almost as much as clean code. At Poland’s largest classifieds portal he orchestrated the transition from monolithic Symfony 3 to a CQRS/Event-Sourcing architecture powered by Laravel Octane and Apache Kafka, handling 2.4 B page views monthly. His Grafana dashboards became the single source of truth for business and tech, surfacing conversion dips within minutes. Damian automated everything: Makefiles, Ansible, Terraform, Pact contract tests, and a Slack bot that ships to production after green canary analysis. He supervised 11 developers across three squads, championed pair programming, and introduced a quarterly 'Architecture Kata' that uncovered fifteen emergent services. Autogenerated section: looking for remote-first senior/lead roles, B2B €65/hour or €98k gross employment, earliest start 15 August. References from CTO, Agile Coach, and PO available. Damian speaks English B2, Polish native, and is learning Italian. Side gigs: building a public API for Polish mountain huts, maintaining an open-source Prometheus exporter for RoadRunner, and guest-lecturing at Wrocław University. Off duty he mountain bikes, brews NEIPA beer, and plays cooperative board games. Prefers product culture, asynchronous communication, basecamp-style shape-ups, and continuous discovery with actual user interviews. Happy to visit headquarters quarterly in Berlin, London, Milan, or remote valleys.

Ahmed Raza

Staff PHP Engineer

Ahmed is a T-shaped PHP veteran who bridges business, code, and clouds. During five years at a Gulf logistics unicorn he containerised a 4-million-line legacy stack, introduced domain events, and ported the pricing engine to Laravel, yielding 32 % faster quotations and $1.8 m hosting savings. Comfortable with AWS CDK, Helm, Redis, PostgreSQL, Elastic, and OpenSearch, he also writes TypeScript React dashboards to visualise SLA breaches in real time. As chapter lead, Ahmed organised 'Tech Talks Tuesday,' ran performance game days, and authored a living wiki that reduced onboarding from 30 to 9 days. Certifications: AWS DevOps Pro, Scrum PSM-II, and ITIL. Autogenerated section: wants challenging senior or staff engineer role, remote within ±4 UTC, salary expectation $120k or equivalent, can relocate to Berlin, Dubai, or Toronto after 90-day notice. References from SVP Engineering and Lead Architect verified. Community work includes maintaining the Laravel Arabisation package, speaking at Laracon Online 2024, and mentoring at WomenInTech Pakistan. Outside work Ahmed plays squash, flies FPV drones, and volunteers for Replate food rescue. He favours companies embracing OKR transparency, data-driven experimentation, paired architecture reviews, and sustainable on-call with follow-the-sun rotation. Open to occasional travel for hackathons in Stockholm, Lisbon, Prague, Singapore, or San Diego too.

Dev augmentation service

Rapid Scalability

Developer augmentation lets you scale PHP capacity up or down instantly, matching project demand without long recruiting cycles.

Cost Efficiency

You avoid overhead costs linked to full-time hires—benefits, office space, and long-term payroll—paying only for the talent and hours you need.

Faster Time-to-Market

Augmented PHP experts can join projects immediately, accelerating feature delivery and helping you beat competitors to release dates.

Access to Specialized Skillsets

Tap into senior PHP developers versed in Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, testing, DevOps, and performance tuning that may be scarce in-house.

Reduced Hiring Risk

Try talent on a contract basis first; if the fit isn’t right, you can rotate developers quickly without the legal and financial risk of firing full-timers.

Keeps Core Team Focused

External PHP specialists handle feature spikes or maintenance, allowing your core engineers to stay focused on strategic, business-critical tasks.

Domain expertise

From large marketplaces to specialised niche stores, PHP frameworks such as Magento, WooCommerce (WordPress) and Laravel are used to build high-traffic shopping carts, payment gateways, catalogue management and order-fulfilment systems.

News portals, magazines, blogs and streaming sites rely on PHP-based CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla to create, curate and monetise content at scale, driving demand for PHP engineers who can extend themes, plugins and APIs.

Payment processors, crowdfunding platforms, neobanks and accounting SaaS often use PHP for secure transactional backends, risk analytics modules and customer dashboards, especially where legacy LAMP stacks must integrate with new microservices.

Hospitals, telemedicine providers and electronic health record (EHR) vendors employ PHP developers to build patient portals, appointment systems and HIPAA-compliant APIs that interface with medical devices and insurance platforms.

Why hire with us

Immediate access to senior-level PHP expertise without lengthy recruitment cycles

Scalable team size—add or reduce PHP developers on demand as project needs change

Lower overhead costs compared with full-time in-house hiring (benefits, office space, equipment)

Faster time-to-market thanks to developers already trained in best PHP frameworks and tools

Reduced hiring risk; augmentation partners handle vetting, contracts, and replacements if needed

Round-the-clock development capability through distributed teams across multiple time zones

Knowledge transfer from specialized developers that upskill your internal staff

Ability to focus internal resources on core business while augmented team handles PHP tasks

Access to a broader technology stack (Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, APIs) within the same engagement

Flexible engagement models—hourly, part-time, or full-time—optimized for budget and project scope

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

Look for solid understanding of PHP 8+, object-oriented programming, familiarity with MVC architecture, experience with common frameworks like Laravel or Symfony, and knowledge of databases, RESTful APIs, and version control (Git).

How much real-world experience is enough to consider a PHP candidate qualified?

Ask for at least three years of hands-on experience or demonstrable contributions to real projects; review code samples, GitHub repos, or portfolio work rather than relying solely on résumé claims.

What is an effective way to assess a PHP developer’s practical skills during the interview process?

Combine a timed coding test, a take-home assignment mirroring your tech stack, and a live code review session where the candidate explains their decisions and trade-offs.

Should I require familiarity with frameworks like Laravel or Symfony for a PHP role?

Yes—framework knowledge accelerates development, enforces best practices, and improves maintainability; proficiency in at least one modern framework indicates the candidate stays current with industry standards.

Which soft skills are most important when choosing a PHP developer?

Communication, problem-solving, adaptability, and the ability to collaborate with designers and front-end developers are critical; these soft skills ensure the developer can translate requirements into clean, reliable code.