PHP developer

A PHP developer designs and builds server-side logic with PHP: studies requirements, models databases, crafts REST APIs, embeds business rules, and integrates external services. They structure code with OOP patterns, Composer packages, namespaces, and follow PSR standards. Unit tests with PHPUnit, containers with Docker, and CI pipelines secure code quality. They cooperate with front-end via Blade, Twig or JSON, profile speed, harden security, fixes bugs, and automate deployment and maintenance.
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Composer

Streamlines PHP package management and autoloading

PhpStorm

Provides intelligent PHP coding assistance and refactoring

Xdebug

Enables advanced PHP debugging and performance profiling

PHPUnit

Facilitates efficient PHP unit testing and coverage

Portfolios

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OmniStore Commerce Engine

Enterprise-grade omnichannel storefront built in PHP
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ContentFlow CMS

Headless CMS optimised for high-throughput publishing
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DataBridge API Platform

Stateless REST layer unifying distributed services
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LivePulse Chat Server

Persistent sockets enabling millisecond realtime messaging
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InsightForge Analytics Dashboard

Self-hosted SaaS metrics with pluggable visualisations

Reviews

Smartbrain filled our senior PHP developer seat in 9 days—half our usual cycle. The vetted pro slipped into our Laravel/MySQL backend without a hiccup, refactored legacy server-side scripting, and cut API response time 22%. Sprints close faster and my crew finally dodges weekend bug-fix duty.

Ethan Carter

Dev Team Lead

Horizon Logistics Systems

Recruiting PHP programmers used to drag 6+ weeks; Smartbrain delivered three vetted mid-level coders in ten days. Their Symfony and CI/CD know-how meant onboarding was effortless. Our web application help-desk portal relaunched a month early, saving $40k and boosting support team productivity.

Linda Morales

HR Professional

Prairie Health Tech

Our e-commerce site limped on PHP 5. Smartbrain’s dedicated developer migrated us to PHP 8 & Laravel, optimized MySQL queries, and integrated Stripe APIs flawlessly. Cart speed doubled, conversions rose 11%, and in-house IT now focuses on strategic full-stack projects instead of endless patching.

Marcus Flynn

CEO

Coastal Retail Solutions

Smartbrain’s contract PHP talent joined our microservice architecture day one, writing PHPUnit tests that lifted coverage to 92%. Their clean backend development shrank the bug queue 30% and delivered analytics dashboards two sprints sooner—massively easing my release management workload.

Sarah Whitaker

Dev Team Lead

Beacon Insurance Analytics

We needed full-stack PHP developers for a headless WordPress project. Smartbrain sourced two gurus in a week, handled all onboarding paperwork, and synced them via Slack instantly. They built a custom REST plugin, cut page load by 1.2 s, and freed design teams to craft fresh ad campaigns.

Scott Jennings

Owner

RedRock Media Group

Tech Stacks

LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

LAMP remains the classic baseline for PHP developers. Running Linux under Apache with MySQL and PHP creates a predictable, well documented environment admired for rock-solid stability. Package managers on every major distribution make updates painless, while .htaccess tricks and mod_rewrite allow quick routing experiments. Shared hosting providers everywhere default to LAMP, so deployment rarely surprises. MySQL tooling is vast, and phpMyAdmin still rescues teams under pressure. In 2023 many projects add Composer, PHPUnit, and GitHub actions, yet core patterns stay familiar to veterans from the early blog era. Autogenerated Section: This paragraph was algorithmically generated for informative, illustrative purposes only.

LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP-FPM)

LEMP swaps Apache for Nginx, delivering leaner memory use and effortless reverse-proxy configurations. PHP-FPM handles requests outside the web server, enabling scaling tricks like horizontal pool replication behind load balancers. MariaDB often replaces upstream MySQL without code changes, adding modern optimizations. Developers love Nginx’s declarative site blocks and built-in caching, shaving milliseconds from critical paths. SSL via Certbot integrates smoothly, encouraging automatic renewals. Because file permissions differ from Apache’s model, continuous integration scripts require attention, yet containerization mitigates surprises. Autogenerated Section: This concise overview was automatically produced to highlight why many performance-minded PHP engineers prefer the LEMP toolkit in production.

Laravel + Vue.js + MySQL

Laravel combined with Vue.js and MySQL forms a modern full-stack pattern affectionately called LVMP by some teams. Laravel’s expressive routing, Eloquent ORM, and robust job queues accelerate backend delivery, while Vue’s component system powers reactive dashboards without abandoning PHP templating entirely. The Laravel Mix build pipeline glues Webpack, Babel, and Sass into one artisan command, keeping front-end assets consistent across environments. Sail or Herd containers replicate production locally, integrating Mailhog, Redis, and Meilisearch out of the box. Autogenerated Section: This description was autogenerated to summarize how Laravel-centric developers assemble reliable SPAs without forsaking established PHP conventions in their daily workflow.

Symfony + API Platform + PostgreSQL

Enterprise teams gravitate toward Symfony coupled with API Platform and PostgreSQL when strict architecture, testing, and long-term maintainability dominate requirements. Symfony’s service container, event dispatcher, and annotation-driven routing encourage clean domain boundaries, while maker bundles scaffold features following best practices. API Platform auto-generates OpenAPI documentation and HAL or JSON-LD responses, drastically shrinking boilerplate for REST or GraphQL endpoints. PostgreSQL offers advanced indexing, full-text search, and native JSON, complementing Doctrine’s flexible entity mappings. Deployment often leverages Kubernetes and Helm charts for blue-green rollouts. Autogenerated Section: This note was automatically generated to outline why regulated industries frequently select the Symfony ecosystem stack.

WordPress Ecosystem

Despite countless new frameworks, WordPress paired with MySQL, Apache or Nginx, and a bustling plugin marketplace remains the most ubiquitous PHP stack. Themes provide quick branding, while Gutenberg’s block editor enables marketing teams to update content without engineering tickets. Developers extend functionality via custom post types, REST endpoints, and hooks, often bundling composer packages through Bedrock or WP-CLI. Caching layers such as Varnish or Cloudflare APO tame page load times. Automatic updates, however, demand staging pipelines to catch plugin conflicts early. Autogenerated Section: This overview was automatically produced to clarify WordPress’s enduring relevance to freelancing and agency development workflows today.

Dockerized PHP Microservices

Modern PHP shops pursuing microservice architectures often rely on Docker Compose stacks blending PHP-FPM, Nginx, Redis, and RabbitMQ, sometimes orchestrated by Kubernetes later. Each service lives in an isolated container image, easing dependency upgrades and letting teams scale bottlenecks independently. Nginx handles TLS termination and static assets; PHP-FPM pods execute application logic; Redis supplies caching and session storage; RabbitMQ coordinates asynchronous jobs that would cripple request latency. Developers debug locally using Xdebug inside containers and publish images to registries through CI pipelines. Autogenerated Section: This automatically generated sketch captures why containerized microservices are rising within ambitious PHP organizations worldwide today.

Shortlist

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Lukas Novak

Senior PHP Developer | Laravel & Microservices

With 9 years of commercial PHP experience, Lukas pairs senior level craft with start-up agility. His last role at a SaaS scale-up saw him lead a squad that rebuilt a payment gateway on Laravel 10, driving checkout latency down 37 %. Code quality matters: Lukas introduced static analysis with Psalm and a mandatory PR checklist, halving escaped defects quarter over quarter. Clean Architecture and DDD are part of his daily routine, and he is equally comfortable slicing monoliths into Dockerised microservices on AWS Fargate. CI/CD? He scripted GitHub Actions pipelines that ship to three environments in under seven minutes. Beyond code, he mentors two mid-level devs and speaks at the Prague PHP meetup about performance profiling with Blackfire. European work authorization, B2 English, Czech native. Availability: 1 month, prefers hybrid Prague/remote. Technical palette also covers Redis streams, ElasticSearch indexing, PHPUnit with mutation testing, and event-driven choreography via RabbitMQ. Security champion for OWASP Top 10 compliance, recently passed internal penetration audit without high-severity findings. Cost optimization initiative cut monthly AWS bill by 18 % through right-sizing and Spot Instances. Personal: hackathons, open-source contributor to Laravel Cashier. Looking for product-led organisations where ownership and autonomy are encouraged. Autogenerated section: This teaser was generated automatically from an anonymised CV for recruiter screening.
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Rahul Iyer

Full-Stack PHP Developer | Symfony, React

Rahul has spent the last four years in a fintech unicorn modernising legacy Symfony 3 codebase to Symfony 6 and Vue first, later React 18. He planned and executed a staged migration that enabled feature parity without downtime, achieving 99.98 % availability across 14 micro-services. His pull requests average 92 % coverage; he is an advocate of TDD and domain fixtures to speed unit isolation. Key wins include designing a rule engine that reduced fraud-check latency from 800 ms to 140 ms, saving $40k monthly in chargebacks. Infra savvy: Docker compose, Kubernetes on GKE, Terraform modules, Pub/Sub, CloudSQL, BigQuery. Recently wrote a GitLab CI template that slashed pipeline minutes in half. Soft skills: certified Scrum Master, daily liaison with product and QA in distributed teams across India and Germany. Mentored four graduates, two promoted in under a year. Loves brown-bag sessions on hexagonal architecture, contributes to Symfony Messenger documentation. Seeking remote-first European company with inclusive engineering culture, can start in three weeks. Personal projects: maintains OSS library that wraps RBI API in PHP SDK downloaded 5000 times; built React Native expense tracker for charity marathon. Enjoys chess, open water swimming, and technical blogging—medium posts on SOLID reach 20k readers. Autogenerated section: Profile auto-generated from candidate résumé by internal NLP bot for recruiter shortlist.
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Carlos Mendes

Lead PHP Engineer | E-commerce Platforms

Carlos is a hands-on technical lead with over a decade crafting high-volume e-commerce back-ends in PHP. In his current role at a Lisbon marketplace he guides six engineers while still contributing 40 % of the code. His headline project was carving a Magento 1 monolith into a Laravel based service layer that talks to Go inventory micro-service via gRPC, comfortably handling Black-Friday traffic spikes of 8 k req/s. He embedded observability: OpenTelemetry traces stream to Grafana and Sentry, slicing mean-time-to-recovery by 43 %. Revenue uplift matters; a dynamic pricing engine he authored nudged average order value up 9 % within one quarter. Toolbelt: PHP 8.2, Laravel, Magento 2, MySQL 8, ElasticSearch, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes on EKS, Terraform, Vault. Quality culture: introduced mutation testing with Infection, enforced semantic versioning in private Composer registry, and standardised ADR documentation. Soft side: certified in Situational Leadership, runs fortnightly 1-on-1s, created an engineering progression matrix now used company-wide. Available for lead or principal roles in EU, Portuguese and fluent English. Outside office, he contributes to PHP-FIG PSR discussions, speaks at Meet Magento, and maintains an open-source queue monitor. Prefers hybrid but open to full remote. Autogenerated section: This card was auto-generated from CV metadata for recruiter quick view.
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Saeed Al-Hassan

Backend PHP Engineer | APIs & Integrations

Saeed is a backend-focused PHP engineer with deep API design pedigree and a knack for untangling gnarly integrations. Over seven years at a Middle-East logistics platform he authored and versioned more than 40 RESTful endpoints currently processing 12M requests per day. His switch to PHP 8.1 with strict_types and attributes trimmed CPU by 17 %. Swagger / OpenAPI first workflow, test suite in PHPUnit and Behat, coverage 90 %. Champion of SOLID principles; code linters run via pre-commit Husky hooks, ensuring PSR-12 compliance. Notable achievement: built bidirectional integration with SAP that synchronises inventory every 60 seconds through event sourcing, eradicating hour-long manual uploads. Infra: Nginx, PHP-FPM, Redis cache, ClickHouse analytics, Docker Swarm, GitHub Actions, Helm, Azure DevOps. Security aware—performed JWT rotation and implemented mTLS between micro-services, passing ISO-27001 audit without findings. Soft factors: writes crystal-clear ADRs, conducts architecture katas weekly, and mentors junior colleagues in Arabic and English. Side projects include open-source webhook framework starred 1k times on GitHub. Currently based in Dubai, holds transferable visa, ready to relocate or remote across GMT+0 to GMT+4. Enjoys domain-driven design podcasts, competitive hackathons, and has recently completed AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification exam. Autogenerated section: Entry produced automatically from candidate dossier for recruiter preview.
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Jonas Berg

PHP Performance Engineer | High-Traffic Systems

Jonas lives and breathes performance. After graduating from Lund University’s computer science department he joined a Swedish news conglomerate where milliseconds translate into ad revenue. Over eight years he tuned monolithic and distributed PHP workloads to squeeze out every drop of speed. Recently, he redesigned the caching strategy for the home page: a layered approach using Varnish, Redis, and HTTP/2 server push that cut median TTFB from 420 ms to 85 ms while surviving 100 k concurrent readers during election night. He is a go-to person for flamegraphs, Blackfire probes and bench harnesses. Jonas also migrated critical pieces to PHP 8.2 JIT, ran Opcache experiments, and co-authored an in-house asynchronous task library based on Swoole. Tools: Nginx, MariaDB Galera, Kafka, Prometheus, Ansible, GitHub Actions. He partnered with DevOps to create blue/green deployment pipelines with canary health checks. Beyond optimisation, Jonas mentors teams on SQL indexing, algorithmic complexity, and writes chapters in the internal engineering playbook. Talks at PHP UK and Scandinavian DevDays recorded 4.9/5 attendee ratings. Interested in contract or permanent roles that challenge latency and scale problems. Available remote within CET. Open-source contributions include PHPBench plugins and an asynchronous PSR-compatible logger library maintenance. Autogenerated section: This synopsis was auto-generated for recruiter consumption.
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Dmitry Ivanov

Polyglot PHP Architect | Cloud Native

Dmitry brings 12 years of polyglot engineering and architecture, centered on PHP but seasoned with Go and Node, to craft resilient cloud-native systems. At a top Russian ride-hailing company he scaled the dispatch platform from 5 to 28 cities, leading an architecture rewrite that introduced CQRS, event sourcing, and a Kafka backbone. Peak throughput now tops 1.2 million trips per day with 99.999 % uptime. He writes RFC-worthy PHP 8 code, enforces ADRs, and maintains an internal toolbox of custom Rector rules for automated refactoring. Cloud expertise: AWS (EKS, RDS Aurora, Step Functions), Terraform, ArgoCD, Helm, Service Mesh with Linkerd. Security: owns threat models, rolled out OIDC with Keycloak. Observability: distributed tracing with Jaeger, Prometheus alerts feeding PagerDuty. People: currently manages three senior engineers, runs blameless post-mortems, and coaches on event-storming. Business impact includes dynamic surge pricing algorithm that boosted GMV 12 %. Loves knowledge sharing—speaker at HighLoad++ and maintainer of PHP EventSauce adapters. Holds EU Blue Card, relocating to Berlin in two months, ready for hybrid or remote across CET. Personal: enjoys algorithmic puzzles, contributes patches to the PHP core, and pilots drones for aerial mapping on weekends. Autogenerated section: This overview was auto-generated from anonymized résumé for recruiter assessment.

Dev augmentation service

Cost Efficiency

Augmenting your team with PHP developers eliminates recruitment expenses, benefits costs, and long onboarding times, letting you pay only for the talent you need when you need it. Autogenerate section: This content was generated automatically.

Access to Specialized Expertise

Developer augmentation services give you instant access to senior-level PHP specialists who have already solved problems similar to yours, speeding up complex feature delivery. Autogenerate section: This content was generated automatically.

Faster Time-to-Market

Additional PHP talent means parallelized development, quicker implementation of new modules, and the ability to release updates ahead of competitors. Autogenerate section: This content was generated automatically.

Flexible Scaling

Easily ramp your PHP team up or down in response to project demands without long-term commitments, keeping budgets and timelines under control. Autogenerate section: This content was generated automatically.

Reduced Management Overhead

Augmentation providers handle HR, payroll, and continuous upskilling, freeing your internal leaders to focus on core product strategy and delivery. Autogenerate section: This content was generated automatically.

24/7 Development Cycle

By leveraging distributed PHP developers across time zones, your project can progress around the clock, accelerating iteration and support responsiveness. Autogenerate section: This content was generated automatically.

Domain expertise

E-commerce & Online Retail

Retailers rely heavily on PHP-based platforms (Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop) to build and scale online stores, manage catalogs, process payments and integrate third-party services. Autogenerate: This content was created automatically.

Media, Publishing & Content Management

News outlets, digital magazines and bloggers use PHP CMSs such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla; they require PHP developers to customize themes, develop plugins and ensure site security and performance. Autogenerate: This content was created automatically.

Software as a Service (SaaS) & Custom Web Applications

Start-ups and enterprises build SaaS products and bespoke web applications with PHP frameworks like Laravel, Symfony or CodeIgniter, creating steady demand for developers to design APIs, implement micro-services and maintain cloud-hosted back ends. Autogenerate: This content was created automatically.

FinTech & Online Payment Solutions

Banks, payment gateways and fintech companies employ PHP developers to create secure transaction systems, subscription billing engines and customer portals that integrate with various financial APIs. Autogenerate: This content was created automatically.

Why hire with us

Immediate access to vetted PHP expertise
Reduced recruitment time and hiring costs
Flexible scaling of development capacity on demand
Faster project kickoff and accelerated delivery timelines
Lower operational overhead for HR, payroll, and infrastructure
Ability to focus in-house team on core business priorities
Injection of fresh perspectives and industry best practices
Contractual SLAs that mitigate delivery and performance risk
Knowledge transfer that upskills the internal engineering team
Option to convert augmented developers to full-time hires if desired