PHP developer

PHP developer designs, builds and maintains server-side web apps. They analyze requirements, architect MySQL/PostgreSQL databases, write PHP classes, functions and APIs, integrate frameworks like Laravel or Symfony, handle authentication, routing, templating, caching and REST endpoints. They debug, manage Composer dependencies, apply SOLID, PSR standards, write tests with PHPUnit, optimize performance, secure against XSS, SQL injection, CSRF, collaborate through Git and CI/CD, deploy to servers.

Нанять исполнителя

Immediate access to proven PHP expertise without lengthy recruitment cycles

Flexible scaling of development capacity up or down as project needs change

Reduced overhead costs such as benefits, office space, and long-term payroll

Faster time-to-market by integrating an already experienced PHP specialist

Knowledge transfer to internal team through close collaboration

Lower risk compared with full-time hiring and traditional outsourcing models

Ability to focus core staff on strategic tasks while augmented developer handles execution

Easier compliance with short-term or project-based budget constraints

Access to wider talent pool beyond local hiring limitations

Streamlined replacement or addition of skills if project requirements evolve

PhpStorm

Feature-rich IDE tailored for PHP developers

Composer

Simplifies dependency management for PHP projects

Xdebug

Advanced debugging toolkit for PHP developers

PHPUnit

Automated testing framework for PHP applications

Portfolios

Custom CMS Framework

Our bespoke Content Management Framework delivers the flexibility of a headless CMS with the performance profile seasoned engineers expect from modern PHP. Built on PHP 8, the system leverages Symfony components, Doctrine ORM, and a caching layer powered by Redis to guarantee single-millisecond page rendering under production loads. A granular role-based permission model, JSON:API output, and multilingual tooling shorten integration time for frontend and mobile teams while preserving security posture. Administrators configure workflows, content types, and approval gates through an intuitive schema designer, eliminating hard-coded migrations and reducing maintenance overhead across distributed micro-site deployments without sacrificing stability or future upgradeability.

Enterprise eCommerce Platform

The Enterprise eCommerce Platform harnesses PHP 8, ElasticSearch, and asynchronous queues to deliver sub-second catalog browsing for assortments exceeding one million SKUs. Modular architecture separates storefront, checkout, and OMS services, enabling horizontal scaling while preserving cohesive domain logic. Advanced promotion engine, rule-based pricing, and PCI-compliant tokenized payments support complex B2B and B2C scenarios simultaneously. The platform’s REST and GraphQL endpoints allow seamless syndication to marketplaces, headless frontends, and native apps. Built-in A/B testing hooks, web-vitals telemetry, and automated deployment pipelines let engineering teams iterate quickly, boost conversion, and maintain rigorous SLA targets without compromising governance or observability at scale globally.

Unified API Gateway

The Unified API Gateway consolidates disparate legacy and third-party services behind a single OAuth2-secured endpoint, dramatically simplifying client code and reducing brittle dependency chains. Built with high-performance PHP-FPM, Swoole, and OpenAPI-driven contract tests, the gateway consistently processes over 5,000 requests per second with sub-30 ms latency. Circuit breakers, rate limiting, and JSON schema validation are enforced centrally, guaranteeing SLA compliance across internal teams and external partners. A real-time metrics dashboard exports Prometheus data for Grafana visualization, while Canary and Blue-Green deployment strategies minimize downtime. Versioning, deprecation notices, and automated SDK generation further accelerate product delivery across web, mobile, and IoT surfaces.

SaaS CRM Suite

The SaaS CRM Suite equips sales and support organizations with a unified 360-degree customer view powered entirely by robust PHP micro-services. Built atop Laravel, CQRS, and event sourcing, every interaction—from lead creation to post-sale ticket—streams into a Kafka bus, ensuring immutable audit trails and near real-time analytics. Dynamic pipeline stages, custom fields, and pluggable governance rules let enterprise teams mould processes without code forks. A multi-tenant architecture isolates data per organisation while shared resource pools optimise infrastructure spend. Native integrations with Exchange, Slack, and VOIP systems accelerate adoption, whereas comprehensive REST and WebSocket APIs empower bespoke extensions and smart automation.

Real-Time Analytics Dashboard

The Real-Time Analytics Dashboard translates raw event streams into actionable insights within seconds, giving product owners and operations staff unprecedented visibility. PHP-powered workers ingest data via Apache Kafka, normalize payloads with Symfony Serializer, and write aggregates to ClickHouse for sub-second query performance. Interactive dashboards built with Vue.js consume a JSON API, enabling drill-down views across cohorts, funnels, and custom KPIs. A configurable alerting engine pushes thresholds to PagerDuty, Slack, or email, ensuring critical anomalies never go unnoticed. Role-based access, SAML single sign-on, and audit logging satisfy stringent compliance mandates while edge caching through Varnish keeps global response times consistently low.

Reviews

Smartbrain filled our urgent PHP 8 / Laravel vacancy in just six days, slicing a month off our usual recruiting cycle. The pre-vetted dev synced with our GitHub workflow day one, refactored legacy MySQL queries, and sprint velocity jumped 22%. HR paperwork hours dropped by 40%.

Lindsey Carter

HR Professional

BrightWave Analytics

Hiring normally takes us 45 days; Smartbrain delivered a senior Symfony engineer in five. After one onboarding call he plugged into our Jenkins CI/CD, crushed the stalled API-caching ticket, and optimized server-side scripting. Output up 30%, my team finally breathes.

Marcus Hall

Dev Team Lead

RedRiver Logistics Tech

Fintech demands spotless code and PCI compliance. Smartbrain sourced a full-stack PHP developer with Stripe and Laravel Vapor chops inside a week. She rebuilt our payment microservice, cut response time 35%, and saved me from weeks of résumé screening.

Vanessa Price

CEO

OrbitPay Solutions

Our plant dashboard ran on a creaky LAMP stack. Smartbrain’s contract PHP guru onboarded overnight, built a REST endpoint for IoT sensors, and added PHPUnit coverage we’d postponed. Production downtime fell and my in-house devs finally cleared the feature backlog.

Ethan Brooks

Owner

BlueHorizon Manufacturing Systems

Campus recruiting couldn’t keep pace with our WordPress SaaS growth. Smartbrain delivered two PHP 8 pros versed in WooCommerce and Gutenberg within seven days. They fit right into our Slack/Agile rituals, shipped fixes instantly, and cut client tickets by 28%.

Gabriella Ruiz

HR Professional

Canyon Creek Media

Tech Stacks

LAMP Stack

LAMP remains the archetypal PHP hosting environment. Linux provides a stable operating system foundation, Apache supplies the battle-tested HTTP server, MySQL handles relational data storage, and PHP executes server-side application logic. The stack’s components are entirely open source, extremely well documented, and available on virtually every shared hosting provider, making onboarding painless for junior programmers. Mature tooling like cPanel, phpMyAdmin, and mod_php simplify deployment and maintenance. Because thousands of guides, tutorials, and example projects reference LAMP conventions, troubleshooting rarely requires proprietary support. While containerization is gaining ground, classic LAMP still powers countless corporate intranets, blogs, and small e-commerce storefronts today.

LEMP Stack

LAMP’s leaner cousin, the LEMP stack swaps Apache for the high-performance Nginx web server and often uses PHP-FPM to run scripts efficiently. Linux continues as the operating system layer, while MySQL or MariaDB remain the popular relational engines. Because Nginx excels at handling concurrent connections with minimal memory overhead, LEMP frequently underpins traffic-intensive SaaS platforms and APIs written in modern PHP frameworks. Configuration is generally managed through concise virtual host files and systemd service units, making automated provisioning with Ansible or Terraform straightforward. Coupled with Let’s Encrypt integration, developers can offer HTTPS by default without extra licensing costs or complexity.

Laravel + Vue + MySQL Stack

Combining Laravel for back-end elegance, Vue.js for reactive front-end interfaces, and MySQL for structured data, this full-stack trio is a favorite among modern PHP practitioners. Laravel’s expressive syntax, Eloquent ORM, and artisan tooling accelerate domain modeling and scaffolding, while Vue.js components sit comfortably within Blade templates or act as standalone single-page applications through Inertia or Vite. Developers enjoy cohesive JavaScript-PHP workflows, automatic TypeScript support, and unified testing with Pest or PHPUnit. Forge, Vapor, and Envoyer streamline deployment to virtual machines, containers, or serverless infrastructures. With thousands of community packages, the ecosystem covers authentication, payments, queues, and real-time broadcasting effortlessly today.

Symfony + API Platform + React Stack

Developers seeking robust, enterprise-grade architecture often choose the Symfony, API Platform, and React combination. Symfony furnishes a decoupled, reusable component library and full-featured framework favoring explicit configuration and long-term stability. API Platform layers atop it to autogenerate OpenAPI documentation, GraphQL endpoints, and HAL or JSON-LD payloads, drastically reducing boilerplate when exposing RESTful services. A separate React front-end consumes these hypermedia APIs, enabling rich, progressive web experiences with Redux, Next.js, or Vite tooling. The separation enforces clean domain boundaries, promotes horizontal scaling, and welcomes mobile clients effortlessly. Docker, Kubernetes, and CI pipelines integrate seamlessly due to Symfony’s environment-variable convention by default.

WordPress Content Stack

WordPress, paired with a curated plugin suite and the Gutenberg block editor, forms a ubiquitous PHP content stack powering blogs, marketing sites, and lightweight e-commerce shops. Its theming hierarchy, REST API, and multisite capabilities allow developers to craft custom experiences without abandoning core update paths. WooCommerce extends functionality into full product catalogs, while Advanced Custom Fields and Custom Post Types UI enable flexible data modeling. Deployment can be as simple as copying files to shared hosting or as sophisticated as running Bedrock and Trellis for dependency isolation and automated provisioning. Vast community support accelerates problem solving and experimentation for all.

Headless Drupal Stack

Drupal’s API-first initiative has transformed the venerable CMS into a powerful headless platform used by PHP developers who need configurable content modeling, multilingual support, and stringent access control. Core JSON:API and GraphQL modules expose structured entities securely, while the Paragraphs and Layout Builder modules empower editors visually. Front-end teams often consume these endpoints using Gatsby, Nuxt, or Next.js, delivering static or dynamic experiences with lightning performance. Composer-based workflows, configuration management, and Drush commands foster reliable deployments across multiple environments. Paired with Redis, Varnish, or CDN layers, headless Drupal scales gracefully under newsroom or governmental traffic spikes worldwide at any time.

Shortlist

John Carter

Senior PHP Developer

Ten years shaping high-traffic SaaS back-ends with clean, test-driven PHP is the through-line of John’s profile. After mentoring a 14-strong engineering pod at FinTechUp, he re-architected a legacy Symfony 3 system into decoupled services on Symfony 6, shrinking API latency by 48 % while introducing CQRS, RabbitMQ queues and GitHub Actions CI/CD. He complements framework mastery with SOLID craftsmanship, PHPUnit coverage above 92 % and a designer’s respect for UX flows when building REST/GraphQL endpoints for React and Flutter teams. Containerisation is second-nature: Docker Compose for local parity, Kubernetes for blue/green rollouts, Terraform for map-once infrastructure. Security achievements include Snyk-driven dependency hygiene and improving PCI-DSS compliance from SAQ-D to SAQ-A-EP within one quarter. Beyond code, John speaks business; he has presented ROI-centred roadmaps to C-suite stakeholders and refined agile rituals as certified Scrum Master. Available for hybrid London roles or fully remote CET-compatible engagements, he is visa-ready for EU travel. Soft-skill snapshot: empathetic mentor, crisp communicator, data-led decision maker. Tech radar: PHP 8.3, Symfony, Laravel, Doctrine, Redis, MySQL, Elastic, AWS, GitLab, Prometheus, Grafana. Cultural interests: jazz piano, park runs, open-source contributions. Personality summary: calm under pressure, obsessed with quality, thrives in cross-functional partnerships, ready to uplift any engineering culture, starts immediately. [Autogenerated-ID:CV-PHP-0001]

Marco Silva

Lead PHP / DevOps Engineer

Marco mixes eight years of PHP brilliance with a DevOps mindset that lets product teams ship fearless releases weekly. At HealthiCloud he migrated a colossal Laravel monolith to a domain-driven microservice suite powered by PHP 8.2, RoadRunner workers and gRPC, dropping AWS spend 32 % and unlocking parallel onboarding of partner clinics. Under his guidance, cyclomatic complexity fell below 4 on all critical paths and Behat contract tests guard sixty external integrations. He is equally comfortable tuning query plans in Aurora MySQL, profiling opcache, or crafting bespoke Composer plugins to keep internal SDKs version-safe. Marco co-authored an RFC adopted into PHP-FIG PSR-22 draft, evidencing community impact. Certified Kubernetes Administrator, he designs Helm charts, GitLab pipelines, and ArgoCD rollbacks that make SREs smile. Colleagues praise his clear diagrams, Spanish-Portuguese bilingualism, and uncanny ability to simplify GDPR legalese for engineering ears. When not coding he mentors bootcamp graduates, has spoken at PHP Rio and Laracon EU, and maintains an open-source JWT library with 1k stars. Currently based in Lisbon, willing to relocate or work remote GMT±2. Values: ownership, feedback loops, continuous improvement. Extra focus on accessibility, pair programming enthusiast, designs failure-mode-aware APIs, brings calm energy, available from August for new challenges today. [Autogenerated-ID:CV-PHP-0002]

Artem Volkov

PHP Solution Architect

Artem is the architect you call when legacy PHP threatens to stall growth. Over eleven years he has led gradual modernisations for e-commerce giants, sequencing strangler-fig patterns that keep cash registers ringing while code is reborn. His latest success at FashionHub replaced 600 k lines of tangled PHP 5.6 with modular Laravel 10 packages, automated via Rector and Psalm CI gates, achieving 85 % unit coverage and 99.98 % uptime during Black Friday. Performance obsessions show in his benchmark notebook: Swoole async tasks, Redis Bloom filters, and finely tuned MariaDB indexes that shaved 200 ms from checkout. Artem promotes DevSecOps: Trivy scans, HashiCorp Vault secrets, OWASP ZAP regression jobs. He writes ADRs, grooms Jira boards, and runs “pizza & DDD” workshops that turn requirements into well-named aggregates. Soft skills shine through multicultural teams; he has managed developers across RU, PL, IN and US time zones with empathy and explicitness. Outside work he contributes to Symfony Docs and records Russian podcasts about clean architecture. Ready for contract or perm, remote first, UTC+3 overlap. Tools: PHPStorm, Xdebug, Makefile magic. Hobbies: cycling, latte art, Rubik’s cube speed-solving. Seeks inventive product teams, values psychological safety, continuous discovery, rejects bureaucracy, loves whiteboard problem-solving, starts within four weeks globally. [Autogenerated-ID:CV-PHP-0003]

Daniel Ortiz

Senior Laravel Engineer / Tech Lead

Daniel blends strong Laravel chops with rare product acuity gained from co-founding a prop-tech startup that scaled to Series B. Seven years hands-on coding plus two years as CTO give him a holistic lens: he still writes crisp pull-requests daily, yet can debate CAC payback with finance. In his current role at BuildNest he drove a multi-tenant SaaS rebuild, switching from Blade to Livewire+Alpine rendering, introducing feature flags, tenancy separation via stancl/tenancy, and event sourcing for audit trails, resulting in 35 % faster roadmap delivery. Daniel automates everything: make targets provision Docker, Pest PHP covers 95 %, PhpMetrics runs on PRs, and SonarCloud gates technical debt. On DevOps side he’s comfortable with ECS Fargate, CloudFront, CloudWatch Insights, and lambdas for image optimisation. Accessibility and i18n are treated as first-class citizens; he led WCAG 2.2 AA compliance certification. Mentorship credits include promoting three mid-level devs to senior within a year through structured pairing and architecture katas. Communication style: concise, data-backed, humour-infused. Based in Madrid, open to remote or hybrid visits. Interests: indie hacking, urban gardening, climbing. Tech palette: PHP 8.x, Laravel, Livewire, Vue3, Redis, PostgreSQL, TailwindCSS, AWS, Terraform, Datadog. Champion of domain-driven thinking, loves metrics, proactive risk management, can start next month happily. [Autogenerated-ID:CV-PHP-0004]

Luca Bernardi

Backend Lead / Principal PHP Engineer

Luca is a polyglot backend lead whose heart still beats strongest for elegant PHP. After mastering Java and Go he returns to PHP with renewed appreciation, championing typed properties, attributes, and readonly classes introduced in 8.x. At TourismNow he steered a greenfield project using Symfony 6, API Platform, and Messenger to ingest 5 M hotel updates daily, serving them via blazing fast JSON:API endpoints cached in Varnish and streamed through Mercure. The system withstands 30k rps with p99 below 120 ms. Luca embeds observability from day one: OpenTelemetry traces funnel into New Relic; alerts route through OpsGenie. He believes tests are documentation: infection mutation score sits at 80 %, consumer-driven Pact contracts secure B2B edges. As team lead he runs weekly learning hours, practises radical candor, and shaped a psychologically safe culture with eNPS +65. Security champion duties see him conduct threat modelling and organise annual CTFs. Outside tech he is a trained jazz guitarist and speaks Italian, English and German. Prefers async-first communication, CET hours overlap. Target roles: technical lead, staff engineer, or principal architect. Stack keywords: PHP, Symfony, Doctrine, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Elastic, Docker, GCP, Terraform. Ready for remote leadership, eager to mentor globally, loves travel, starts within two weeks seamlessly. [Autogenerated-ID:CV-PHP-0005]

Alexei Petrov

Real-Time PHP Performance Expert

Alexei specialises in high-frequency trading platforms where microseconds matter, proving that PHP can deliver deterministic performance when engineered with care. At QuantEdge he crafted a ReactPHP event loop service handling 2 M price ticks per second, backed by in-memory shards of ClickHouse and powered by PHP 8.1 JIT with custom opcache warm-up scripts. Latency budget: 4 ms roundtrip. He authored an Swoole extension in C to expose RDMA sockets and contributed patches upstream. Alexei thrives on science-driven optimisation; perf flamegraphs and cachegrind snapshots decorate his Confluence pages. Quality is guarded by phpspec examples, static analysis (PHPStan level max) and Gatling load gates in CI. He evangelises Chaos Engineering, regularly inducing packet loss in staging to validate circuit breakers. Leadership includes guiding three juniors through complex math models, converting requirements into code without lost precision. Holds PhD in applied mathematics, speaks at PHP Russia, wrote chapter in “Advanced Asynchronous PHP”. Tools loved: Nix flakes, GitHub Actions, Grafana Loki, Prometheus, Kibana. Relocation-ready, open to fully remote UTC+4 roles. Hobbies: freediving, board games, retrocomputing. Core stack: PHP, ReactPHP, Swoole, ClickHouse, Redis, Kafka, C, Docker, Bare-metal. Seeks deep-tech missions, zero-ego teams, continuous-profiling culture, willing to start pilot contract tomorrow, delivers measurable speed wins swiftly always. [Autogenerated-ID:CV-PHP-0006]

Dev augmentation service

Rapid Team Scaling

Developer augmentation lets you add experienced PHP professionals to your team almost instantly, eliminating lengthy recruitment cycles and enabling you to scale resources up or down as project demands change.

Cost Efficiency

Augmenting with external PHP talent avoids the long-term costs of full-time hires—such as benefits, onboarding, and infrastructure—while giving you predictable, project-based budgeting.

Access to Diverse Skill Sets

Augmentation partners maintain pools of PHP developers skilled in frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, and WordPress, giving you easy access to niche expertise that may be scarce in-house.

Faster Time-to-Market

With seasoned PHP developers joining immediately, you reduce development backlogs and accelerate product releases, helping you seize market opportunities ahead of competitors.

Reduced Hiring Overhead

Outsourcing screening, interviewing, and administrative tasks to an augmentation provider frees your HR and management teams to focus on core business priorities.

Flexible Engagement Models

Whether you need short-term sprint support or long-term collaboration, augmentation services offer adaptable contracts that align with agile or waterfall workflows without locking you into rigid commitments.

Domain expertise

Companies that sell products or services online rely heavily on PHP-based platforms such as Magento, WooCommerce and PrestaShop. PHP developers are needed to build custom storefronts, integrate payment gateways, optimize performance and keep transaction flows secure. Autogenerated section: This text was created programmatically.

News outlets, blogs, and corporate websites often run on CMSs like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla—all written in PHP. Publishers hire PHP developers to customize themes, extend functionality and ensure sites scale with traffic spikes. Autogenerated section: This text was created programmatically.

Payment processors, digital wallets and lending startups use PHP to build APIs, dashboards and customer portals thanks to its rich ecosystem and rapid development cycle. PHP developers help integrate banking networks, implement security layers and comply with financial regulations. Autogenerated section: This text was created programmatically.

From CRM and ERP systems to project-management and marketing automation tools, many SaaS offerings leverage PHP frameworks like Laravel and Symfony. Businesses need PHP developers to create new features, maintain microservices and ensure multi-tenant scalability. Autogenerated section: This text was created programmatically.

Why hire with us

Immediate access to vetted, senior-level PHP expertise

Rapid team scaling without long-term hiring commitments

Lower total cost of ownership compared with full-time hires

Seamless integration with your existing development workflow

24/7 development cycles through distributed, time-zone-aligned talent

Reduced HR, payroll, and benefits administration overhead

Faster project delivery thanks to mature Agile and CI/CD practices

On-demand knowledge of the latest PHP frameworks and tools

Built-in risk mitigation via service-level agreements and backups

Freedom to reallocate internal staff to core business priorities

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

Look for solid understanding of PHP 8+, object-oriented design, Composer for dependency management, automated testing with PHPUnit or Pest, RESTful API design, database proficiency (MySQL, PostgreSQL or NoSQL), familiarity with a major framework such as Laravel or Symfony, and a clear grasp of security topics like SQL injection, XSS and CSRF mitigation.

How can I effectively assess a candidate’s familiarity with modern PHP frameworks?

Ask candidates to walk through a recent project built with a framework (e.g., Laravel). Request a small take-home task or live coding session that touches routing, Eloquent/Doctrine ORM, dependency injection and testing. Their ability to follow framework conventions, leverage tooling like Artisan and explain design decisions quickly reveals depth of experience.

Should a PHP developer also know DevOps tools and practices?

Yes. While not every PHP developer must be a DevOps expert, competence with version control (Git), containerization (Docker), CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins) and cloud deployment basics increases productivity and reduces hand-offs between development and operations teams.

Which soft skills are important when selecting a PHP developer?

Strong communication, problem-solving mindset, ability to translate business requirements into technical tasks, openness to code reviews, and willingness to document and share knowledge are crucial. Since PHP projects often evolve quickly, adaptability and collaboration matter as much as pure coding talent.

How much experience is generally sufficient for a PHP developer role?

For mid-level roles, 3–5 years of hands-on experience with production applications is typical. More important than the calendar years, however, is evidence of maintaining or shipping multiple projects, contributing to code reviews, handling performance or security issues in production and staying current with PHP’s release cycle.