For codebases with years of history and no room for a rewrite
Hire PHP Developers
Most PHP work is not a greenfield build, it is a codebase with years of accumulated decisions that still has to keep running. These engineers are tested on working safely inside exactly that constraint, then placed wherever your codebase needs careful, deliberate hands.
- Profiles typically within two business days
- Replacement Assurance: If an engineer is not the right fit, a replacement from our own team starts within ten business days of your request, at no extra cost
- You interview before placement if you want to
- At least four hours a day inside your core working hours. Two hours plus a daily written handover for the US West Coast
- 14-Day Risk-Free Trial: For your first engineer on a time-and-materials engagement. Up to 14 calendar days or 80 logged working hours, whichever comes first. End within the trial and pay nothing for trial hours. Continue beyond it and those hours are billed at the agreed rate. Unpaid trial work remains ours if you stop
How we evaluate a PHP engineer
The tasks, the signals and the onboarding, walked through by the people who run them.
90 secSample frame · video pending01Published, not promised
The assessment behind every engineer we send.
The PHP bar is published, not assumed: five competencies, the exact task behind each, and the shortcut that ends a candidacy. Most interviews ask about framework trends. This one asks whether an old codebase stays safe.
What we listen forWhether they change behaviour deliberately, not accidentally.
You inherit a ten-year-old codebase with no tests and need to make a change safely. Describe your approach.
- What strong sounds like
- Proposes characterising the existing behaviour first, often with targeted tests, before changing anything.
- What gives us pause
- Makes the change directly and plans to fix anything that breaks, without first understanding what the code currently does.
PHP 8 · Laravel · Symfony
WordPress · WooCommerce · Drupal
PHPUnit · Pest · Xdebug
Composer · Docker · MySQL
02Who you actually meet
The bench, priced by seniority.
Three seniority tiers, priced honestly, and the engineers who fill each one today. Real names and photos take their place as soon as we can share them, and the standard stays exactly the same.
Engineer
Features scoped tightly enough to ship inside your review bar, every time.
The right first hire when your seniors already set the standard.
$2,100–2,700per month
Senior
The hard module nobody else wants to own, taken end to end.
Ownership of a surface, without adding a manager to your headcount.
$3,000–3,800per month
Lead
The workstream's decisions, made daily, so nothing waits on a meeting.
One accountable voice for a pod or initiative that can't afford to drift.
$4,100–5,100per month
PHP engineer
3 yrs · UK overlap
Found and fixed a SQL injection risk a previous agency had missed for two years
- PHP 8
- Laravel
- PHPUnit
Senior PHP engineer
7 yrs · EU hours
Staged a five-step PHP version migration with zero customer-facing downtime
- Symfony
- MySQL
- Docker
Lead PHP engineer
10 yrs · US East split
Owns the security review standard now applied across four legacy applications
- Architecture
- WordPress
- Composer
- Xdebug
Indicative ranges, representative profiles. Exact figures and named engineers arrive with your shortlist.
Weighing this against a freelancer, a direct hire or a marketplace? See the honest comparison
03From stated problem to first change
Four steps, each closing on evidence.
This process tests judgement about legacy code, not enthusiasm for the newest framework. Walking away at any step costs you nothing.
Define the codebase problem
We map where your codebase's safety or performance is actually at risk. The brief names that problem, not a list of PHP frameworks to know.
A brief your leads signMatch against your codebase
Candidates are screened against your actual framework version, your test coverage and your review culture. Three engineers who understand your codebase beat thirty who list PHP on a CV.
Three fits, not thirty CVsAssess on the real tasks
Your team can watch the legacy-safety and migration-planning exercises directly. What shows up is careful judgement, not a rehearsed opinion about frameworks.
Evaluation you can watchOnboard inside your process
Access, standards and a first bounded, safe change to real production code. Continuity cover keeps a departure from ever becoming your emergency.
A merged change in week one
04Evidence and proof
Engineers who kept an old codebase safe.
PHP proof is a legacy system kept safe and fast, not a greenfield showcase. Every record here waits for written client approval before production.
Explore case studies
A ten-year-old checkout flow upgraded without a single day of downtime.
Koru Health's PHP checkout ran on an end-of-life version nobody wanted to touch. An embedded PHP engineer staged the migration in five safe increments, adding test coverage as it went, with zero customer-facing downtime.
- Downtime during migration
- Zero
- PHP versions caught up
- Two, in stages
He found a SQL injection risk our previous agency had missed for two years.
Sample · pending client approval
The N+1 query fix she made cut our page load time without touching a single line of business logic.
Sample · pending client approval
05Three shapes, one standard
Add an engineer, a maintenance pod, or a practice.
Most teams start with one engineer working carefully inside an existing codebase. Some need a pod that owns the whole application's health. Where a rebuild is the honest answer rather than maintenance, we point you to the practice instead.
- Team extension
One named engineer
A single PHP specialist inside your direction and your reviews. The smallest commitment, and the usual starting point.
- Delivery pods
A maintenance pod
A pod with its own lead that owns your application's stability, security and performance end to end. You set priorities while the pod carries delivery.
- Custom software development
The practice, not the person
Where a rebuild is the honest answer rather than years of careful maintenance, custom software development takes that scope on instead.
06Straight answers
Asked before a PHP hire is signed.
01What does a PHP engineer actually do day to day?
Makes deliberate, tested changes to code with years of history, closes security gaps found in audits, and diagnoses performance issues at real data volume. The unglamorous majority of the work is understanding what existing code does before changing it.
02Do you hire for Laravel, Symfony or WordPress specifically?
Matched to your actual stack. Judgement about legacy safety and security transfers across frameworks, then the evaluation confirms familiarity with whichever your codebase runs.
03Can we run our own interviews as well?
Yes, the published tasks are built to be reused directly. Several clients now run the legacy-safety exercise themselves in later hiring rounds.
04How fast can a PHP engineer start?
A shortlist arrives within days from a bench evaluated continuously. Onboarding speed after that depends mostly on how fast your side can open repository access.
05Who manages the engineer day to day?
Your leads set priorities and hold the review bar. We carry the employment side of it instead: continuity, payroll, replacement risk and the handoff when plans change.
06What if the engineer is not the right fit?
Bring it up in the first weeks and the cost of replacing them is ours. The next engineer gets briefed on the exact miss, so it rarely happens twice.
07Do your PHP developers use AI coding tools?
Yes, openly. AI drafts boilerplate and repetitive test cases quickly; the engineer stays accountable for every legacy-safety decision, security fix and merge that reaches your codebase.
08How does pricing work for a hired PHP engineer?
The bands above set the honest range; the shortlist confirms the exact figure once scope is clear. Monthly billing, no placement fee, notice-period exit only.