Backend
Hire PHP Developers
PHP engineers who write modern PHP 8 and can also stabilise the legacy code you inherited.
PHP earns its place through the sheer volume of working software already written in it, and PHP 8 is a genuinely different language from the one its reputation was formed on — typed, fast, with an opcache and JIT that closed most of the performance argument. Laravel and Symfony are serious frameworks by any standard.
When hiring, the useful question is about inherited code, because that is what most PHP engineers will be handed. Ask how they approach an application with no tests and no documentation, how they decide what to rewrite and what to leave alone, and what they check first on a codebase that has been publicly exposed for years. Anyone who reaches immediately for a rewrite has not maintained one of these.
What these engineers do
- PHP 8.3 and 8.4 with typed properties, enums, readonly classes and fibers
- Laravel 11 and Symfony 7 applications with queues, events and feature tests
- Upgrades from PHP 5 and 7 codebases, starting with characterisation tests
- WordPress and WooCommerce work at plugin and API level rather than theme patching
- PHPStan or Psalm at a level that is actually enforced, with PHPUnit coverage that means something
Delivered AI-first
Most PHP work arriving at an agency is inherited rather than new, so AI assistance is aimed at legacy first - reading undocumented code and drafting the characterisation tests that make a change safe, then converting mysql_ era database calls, global state and untyped functions into typed, injectable services. Static analysis and the test suite decide whether each step was correct. Security-sensitive code is read by a human every time. Review discipline is unchanged. The measurable effect is throughput per engineer, not fewer reviews.