Hire Remote PHP Developers

Hire Senior PHP Developers Who Build Platforms That Scale

PHP powers over 75% of the world’s websites — including Facebook (Meta), Wikipedia, WordPress, Slack, and Etsy. It’s not a legacy technology; it’s a modern, performant language that continues to evolve rapidly with PHP 8.x bringing JIT compilation, fibers, and union types. The difference between PHP developers who drag your platform down and those who make it fly is architectural discipline and framework mastery.

We staff the latter. Our PHP developers have built and scaled e-commerce platforms, enterprise CMS solutions, SaaS applications, and API backends for companies ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — in your time zone, in English, at 50% of US market rates.

What Our PHP Developers Build

Laravel Applications & APIs

Laravel is the gold standard for modern PHP development. Our PHP engineers build well-structured Laravel applications with proper use of Eloquent ORM, queues, events, and policies — plus RESTful and GraphQL APIs consumed by React and mobile front-ends.

Symfony Enterprise Applications

Symfony’s component-based architecture is the foundation of enterprise PHP — powering everything from large CMS platforms to complex ERP integrations. Our PHP engineers build and maintain Symfony applications with Doctrine ORM, Messenger, Security, and Symfony’s robust DI container.

WordPress Development & Customization

Custom WordPress themes, plugins, and REST API extensions. Our WordPress-specialized PHP engineers build performant, secure WordPress sites — not out-of-the-box installs, but custom-engineered platforms with proper separation between content management and application logic.

E-Commerce Platform Development

WooCommerce, Magento (Adobe Commerce), and custom PHP e-commerce systems. Our PHP engineers have built storefronts and backend order management systems for brands generating millions in monthly revenue.

API Development & Systems Integration

PHP REST and GraphQL APIs that integrate with third-party systems — payment gateways, ERP systems, CRM platforms, and logistics providers. Our PHP engineers design integration layers that are resilient to upstream changes and observable when they fail.

PHP Technology Stack

Frameworks: Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Slim, Lumen, Yii2

CMS: WordPress, Drupal, Magento/Adobe Commerce, TYPO3

ORM & Data: Eloquent, Doctrine ORM, PDO

Caching: Redis, Memcached, Laravel Cache, Symfony Cache

Queues: Laravel Queues, Symfony Messenger, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS

Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis

Testing: PHPUnit, Pest, Mockery, Behat, Laravel Dusk

Infrastructure: Docker, Nginx, Apache, PHP-FPM, Laravel Vapor (AWS serverless)

PHP Version: PHP 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 (modern typed PHP)

Client Success Story: Scaling a 40-Million-User Content Platform on Modern PHP

A content platform serving 40 million monthly active users was running on PHP 5.6 — end-of-life for years, blocking adoption of modern frameworks, and generating compounding security and performance debt. Page generation times were hurting user experience and search rankings. Our PHP engineers executed a migration to PHP 8.2 with strict typing, adopted the same opcode caching and process management techniques used by the world’s largest consumer web platforms, and refactored the highest-traffic rendering paths to reduce database queries by 70% per page load. Page generation time dropped from 2.8 seconds to 380ms. Server costs decreased 40% despite traffic growing 25% during the engagement. The search ranking improvements from the performance gains generated a measurable lift in organic traffic within three months.

Client Success Story: PHP 5 to PHP 8 Migration and Payments Hardening for a High-Volume E-Commerce Operator

A high-volume e-commerce operator had delayed migrating from PHP 5 for years while the platform grew to process millions of orders annually — accumulating security vulnerabilities and a billing flow riddled with race conditions that caused intermittent double-charge and failed-charge incidents. Our PHP engineers executed a phased migration to PHP 8, introduced enum-based state machines for transaction handling, replaced bespoke session management with a hardened implementation, and built comprehensive Pest test coverage that jumped from 12% to 84%. The billing race conditions were eliminated entirely. Developers reported shipping features 55% faster on the modern codebase. The PCI compliance audit, previously a two-week process that surfaced new findings every cycle, passed in three days with zero new findings.

Why Companies Choose Our PHP Developers

• Modern PHP practitioners: Our engineers write PHP 8.x with strict types, named arguments, union types, enums, and fibers — not the PHP of 2010
• Framework depth: Laravel and Symfony aren’t just tools our engineers have used — they’re frameworks they’ve mastered, contributed to, and built real production systems with at scale
• Security-conscious: PHP has a reputation for insecure legacy code, and our engineers know every vector — SQL injection, CSRF, XSS, file upload vulnerabilities — and write code that eliminates them by design
• Performance-tuned: OPcache configuration, query optimization, N+1 elimination, Redis caching, and CDN integration — our PHP engineers squeeze performance out of every layer of the stack
• 50% cost savings: Fully-burdened rates including salary, benefits, taxes, and HR

Engagement Models

• Individual PHP Engineer — A senior PHP developer embedded in your existing team. Ideal for adding a Laravel or Symfony specialist, a legacy PHP modernization lead, or a PHP-FPM performance engineer to a team that already has PHP direction.
• PHP Backend Pods (2–4 engineers) — PHP developers paired with QA and DevOps in a coordinated squad. Common for teams building new Laravel services, executing PHP version migrations, or scaling multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
• Full PHP Teams (5–20+ engineers) — Complete engineering organizations for large Laravel or Symfony platforms, high-volume e-commerce operations, and enterprise CMS builds at scale.
• Contract-to-Hire PHP Engineers — Evaluate a PHP engineer in your codebase before committing to a permanent hire. Modern PHP engineers leave a clear footprint — OPcache tuning, N+1 elimination, typed PHP — you’ll see the difference within weeks.

How To Vet PHP Developers

Our PHP vetting filters for engineers who write modern, secure, typed PHP — not the PHP of 2010. The four-stage process:

1. Technical screening — PHP 8.x internals (OPcache behavior, PHP-FPM process model, JIT compilation, fibers), framework depth (Laravel service container, Eloquent query generation, Symfony Messenger, Doctrine), security fundamentals, and testing philosophy (PHPUnit, Pest, Mockery). Over 90% of applicants do not pass this stage.
2. Take-home exercise — Build a multi-model Laravel feature: a REST API endpoint with Form Request validation, Eloquent relationships with eager loading, queue-dispatched jobs, and a Pest test suite covering the happy path and failure cases. Evaluated on query efficiency, security, and test coverage.
3. Live technical interview — N+1 query debugging in Eloquent, OPcache and PHP-FPM configuration for production performance, code review on a PHP codebase with real security and architecture issues embedded.
4. Communication screening — PHP engineers often work on platforms that non-technical stakeholders care deeply about (e-commerce revenue, content reach, payment reliability). We assess the ability to explain technical decisions in business terms.

What to Look for When Hiring PHP Developers

Senior PHP developers know the framework deeply enough to know when the framework is the problem — and they’ve operated PHP in production at a scale where OPcache configuration and PHP-FPM worker tuning are real levers.

What strong candidates demonstrate:

• They understand PHP 8.x’s modern type system — typed properties, union types, named arguments, enums, readonly properties, and fibers — and they use them because they improve correctness, not just because they’re available
• They’ve profiled PHP applications under production load: they know how to read OPcache statistics, identify PHP-FPM saturation, and use tools like Blackfire or Tideways to find bottlenecks
• They can eliminate N+1 queries in Eloquent or Doctrine without resorting to raw SQL — and they write the code in a way that makes the eager loading intent obvious to the next developer
• They have a security-aware coding practice: they understand why specific Laravel features (mass assignment protection, parameterized queries, CSRF tokens) prevent specific attack vectors — not just “use the framework”

Red flags to watch for:

• Not knowing what PHP-FPM actually does or how to configure worker pool size for a given traffic profile — a sign they’ve only deployed PHP in local environments
• Never having configured OPcache — or not knowing that incorrect OPcache settings cause performance cliffs at scale that look like application bugs
• Treating dd() and var_dump() as the primary debugging tools — a sign they haven’t worked with proper debugging infrastructure (Xdebug, Ray, Telescope)
• No testing philosophy — candidates who say “Laravel handles security” without understanding why specific security controls exist

Interview questions that reveal real depth:

• “Walk me through debugging a slow Laravel application under production load. What tools would you use, and what would you look for in PHP-FPM metrics vs. Eloquent query logs?”
• “How would you design a multi-tenant Laravel SaaS where tenants share a database but their data must be strictly isolated? What are the trade-offs between shared database, schema-per-tenant, and database-per-tenant approaches?”
• “A Laravel queue worker is falling behind during traffic spikes. Walk me through how you’d diagnose and resolve this without just adding more workers.”

Related Services

• E-commerce Developers — PHP powers the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms. Explore our dedicated e-commerce engineering practice.
• Enterprise Software Developers — PHP alongside Java, Python, and Node.js on our full enterprise backend engineering bench.
• DevOps & SRE Engineers — Pair your PHP team with infrastructure engineers who manage Nginx, PHP-FPM, Docker, and cloud operations.
• Staff Augmentation — The fastest way to add a senior PHP engineer to your existing team.

Want to Hire Remote PHP Developers?

We specialize in sourcing, vetting, and placing senior remote PHP engineers — from individual Laravel or Symfony developers who write modern typed PHP and eliminate N+1 queries on day one, to complete PHP engineering organizations handling millions of users, e-commerce scale, and PCI-compliant payment systems. We make it fast, affordable, and low-risk.

Get matched with PHP developers →

Ready to hire PHP developers who understand OPcache, PHP-FPM, typed PHP 8.x, and the security controls that protect your platform? Contact us today and we’ll introduce you to senior PHP engineers within 48 hours.