Dedicated PHP Talent

Hire PHP Developers Who Can Read The Code You Already Have

Bring on a vetted PHP developer, or a full dedicated team, hourly, part-time or full-time, for core PHP applications, legacy systems nobody wants to touch, PHP 8 upgrades, CodeIgniter and Symfony work, and the APIs that hold it all together.

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PHP 8

Upgrades from 5.x and 7.x, done in stages

3 models

Hourly, dedicated, project-based

1 wk

Typical time to onboard a developer

No lock-in

Month-to-month engagements

Our Clients

Trusted by Visionaries, Built for All

Bold startup or growing enterprise, we craft digital experiences engineered to scale with your vision.

Core PHP Applications
Legacy Modernisation
PHP 8 Upgrades
CodeIgniter & Symfony
REST API Development
Database & Query Work

Why Hire PHP Developers

Most PHP Work Is Not Greenfield

Plenty of developers can start a fresh project on a modern framework. Far fewer can open a ten-year-old codebase with no tests, work out what it does, and change it without breaking the business running on top of it. That is the skill we hire for.

Vetted On Real Code

Developers are assessed on actual PHP, object model and namespaces, PDO and query handling, error and exception design, not a generic algorithm quiz.

Comfortable In Old Code

Procedural PHP, mixed HTML and SQL, no framework at all. Our developers have worked in it before and know how to improve it in safe increments.

Fast Onboarding

Most engagements start within a week, with a developer who can find their way around an unfamiliar PHP codebase without a month of hand-holding.

No Long-Term Lock-In

Month-to-month engagement. Scale up, scale down or wrap up the work without a fixed-term contract working against you.

Engagement Models

Three Ways To Bring A PHP Developer Onto Your Team

Pick the model that fits how much PHP work you actually have, not a one-size-fits-all retainer.

Hourly

For bug fixes, a stubborn integration, or a scope that is still taking shape.

Billed for hours actually worked
No minimum monthly commitment
Good fit for maintenance and small features

Dedicated Developer

A developer works exclusively on your codebase, part-time or full-time, for the length of the engagement.

Context builds up instead of resetting weekly
Direct communication with your team
Best for modernisation and long roadmaps

Project-Based

A fixed-scope build with a defined deliverable, timeline and price.

Clear scope agreed before work starts
Fixed cost, fixed timeline
Best for a single, well-defined project

Skills Our Developers Cover

Everything A PHP Project Actually Needs

Core PHP 8
Object-Oriented PHP
Legacy Refactoring
Version Upgrades & Rector
CodeIgniter
Symfony Components
WordPress & WooCommerce
REST API Development
Third-Party Integrations
MySQL Query Tuning
Queues & Cron Jobs
PHPUnit & Static Analysis

Freelancer vs Agency vs Dedicated Team

Choosing The Right Way To Staff A PHP Project

Model	Reliability	Communication	Best For
Freelance Marketplace	Variable, depends entirely on the individual	Often async, timezone dependent	Very small, one-off tasks
Traditional Agency	Consistent but slower to scale up or down	Layered through account managers	Large, fixed-scope projects
Dedicated Developer (Us)	Vetted, consistent, direct accountability	Direct with the developer and our team	Legacy modernisation and long roadmaps

How Hiring Works

From First Call To Onboarded Developer

1Discovery Call

2Developer Match

3Trial Task

4Onboarding

5Ongoing Delivery

Day 1

Discovery Call

We look at your codebase, PHP version, hosting and the specific skills the work calls for.

Day 2 to 4

Developer Match

We shortlist developers whose real project history matches your stack, not just their years on a resume.

Day 4 to 6

Trial Task

A small paid trial task on your actual codebase, so you see real working code before committing.

Week 1

Onboarding

Access, repo, staging and communication channels set up so the developer can start contributing immediately.

Ongoing

Delivery

Regular check-ins and progress updates, with the flexibility to scale the engagement up or down.

What If The Code Has No Documentation?

That is the normal case, not the exception. The first week is usually spent mapping the code before anything gets changed.

AI And Our PHP Developers

AI Tooling That Earns Its Place In Legacy Code

Our PHP developers use AI tooling as part of the day-to-day workflow, not as a gimmick. It is most useful exactly where PHP work is hardest: reading unfamiliar code. AI-assisted analysis helps summarise what a long, undocumented file is doing before anyone edits it. AI-assisted test generation drafts characterisation tests around legacy functions, so there is a safety net in place before a refactor starts. And AI-assisted code review catches the classic PHP pitfalls, from unescaped output and SQL built by string concatenation to loose comparisons and N+1 queries, during pull requests rather than in production. A developer still reviews and owns every line that ships.

Explore our AI development services

AI-assisted PHP workflow

Map undocumented legacy filesAnalysis

Draft tests before a refactorTesting

Flag injection and comparison bugsReview

Tech Stack

The PHP Stack Our Developers Work In Daily

From the language itself to the tooling that keeps a PHP application testable, fast and stable in production.

PHP 8
Composer
Symfony Components
CodeIgniter
WordPress
MySQL / MariaDB
PostgreSQL
Redis
PHPUnit
PHPStan
Rector
Nginx & PHP-FPM
Docker
Git

Why Raulji

A PHP Team That Owns The Outcome

You are not renting a resume. You get a developer backed by a team that handles PHP work end to end, from the application itself to the servers and search visibility around it.

Full-Service PHP Team

Need more than one developer? We cover the whole PHP development range, so extra hands are already in-house.

Framework Depth When You Need It

If the roadmap points to a framework rebuild, our Laravel development team picks it up without a new vendor search.

Support Beyond Launch

Engagements can roll into ongoing maintenance and managed hosting, so the application stays healthy after go-live.

What The Work Looks Like

Three Typical PHP Engagements

To show how a developer actually slots into a PHP roadmap, here are three example scenarios that reflect the kind of work these engagements cover.

Please read these as illustrative examples, not client case studies. They describe representative PHP work rather than any specific customer, and the outcomes described are not measured results. Our published, verifiable client results are eCommerce projects, and you can read those in full on our case studies page.

Illustrative example
PHP 8 upgrade

An Application Stuck On An Unsupported PHP Version

The situation: a business-critical internal application still runs on PHP 5.6. The host has given notice, the security team is asking questions, and nobody currently on staff wrote the original code.

How the engagement runs: a developer starts by getting the application running locally in Docker, then uses static analysis to find what actually breaks on a modern PHP version rather than guessing. Automated tooling handles the mechanical rewrites, each dependency gets reviewed for a maintained replacement, and the upgrade lands in reviewable stages on staging. The point is that the business never has to sit through a big-bang cutover weekend.

Illustrative example
Legacy modernisation

Ten Years Of Procedural Code With No Tests

The situation: the codebase mixes SQL, HTML and business rules in the same files. Every change carries a risk of breaking something unrelated, so the team has quietly stopped changing anything.

How the engagement runs: nobody proposes a rewrite. A developer identifies the handful of areas that actually change often, writes characterisation tests to pin down current behaviour, then pulls the business rules out into tested classes one at a time. Composer and autoloading come in, then a router, then templates. The application keeps shipping the whole way through, and the parts nobody touches are left alone rather than rewritten for its own sake.

Illustrative example
API and integration

A Monolith That Now Has To Talk To Other Systems

The situation: a PHP application needs to expose data to a new mobile app and sync with an ERP, but its logic only exists inside page controllers that render HTML.

How the engagement runs: a developer extracts the business logic into a service layer the existing pages and a new REST API can both call, so there is one implementation instead of two that drift apart. Authentication, versioning and rate limiting get designed in from the start. The ERP sync runs as queued jobs with retries, logging and a way to replay a failed batch, rather than a nightly script that fails silently.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Questions About Hiring PHP Developers

How quickly can I hire a PHP developer from you?

For most engagements we can have a suitable PHP developer working on your project within a few days, and onboarding is usually complete inside a week. We match you to a developer whose experience fits your stack and goals rather than assigning whoever happens to be free.

What engagement models do you offer?

Three main ones: hourly for smaller or ad-hoc work, a dedicated developer who works with you full or part time as an extension of your team, and project-based for a defined piece of work with a fixed scope and price. We help you pick the model that fits your budget and workload.

Can your developers work on old PHP code with no framework and no tests?

Yes, and it is a large part of what these engagements involve. Procedural code, SQL mixed into templates, no autoloading and no test suite is a normal starting point rather than a dealbreaker. The usual approach is to get the application running in a local environment first, map what the important parts actually do, then add tests around the areas that need to change before changing them.

We are stuck on PHP 5.6 or 7.x. Can you handle the upgrade to PHP 8?

Yes. A version upgrade normally starts with static analysis and automated tooling such as Rector to find what genuinely breaks, rather than opening files at random. Each abandoned dependency gets reviewed for a maintained replacement. The work then lands in reviewable stages on staging so you are not betting the business on a single big cutover.

Should we rewrite our legacy application or modernise it?

In most cases modernising in place is the lower-risk path, and we will say so even though a rewrite is a bigger project for us. A full rewrite means running two systems and reproducing years of undocumented business rules from memory. Refactoring the areas that actually change often, behind tests, keeps the application shipping throughout. A rewrite makes sense when the platform itself is genuinely at a dead end, and we are happy to talk that through honestly before you commit.

Do you work with CodeIgniter, Symfony and other PHP frameworks?

Yes. Our developers work across CodeIgniter, Symfony and its standalone components, WordPress and WooCommerce, and plain core PHP. If your roadmap points towards a Laravel build specifically, our Laravel team can pick that up without you needing to run a new vendor search.

Can you build or modernise REST APIs on an existing PHP application?

Yes. A common pattern is extracting business logic out of page controllers into a service layer that both your existing pages and a new API can call, so there is one implementation rather than two that drift apart. Authentication, versioning, rate limiting and sensible error responses get designed in from the start rather than bolted on later.

What does it cost to hire a PHP developer?

It depends on the seniority you need, how many hours a week the work takes, and how long the engagement runs. We do not publish a fixed rate card because quoting a number before understanding the codebase would not be honest. After the discovery call we give you a clear rate and estimate you can hold us to.

How do you vet your PHP developers?

Developers are assessed on real PHP work rather than generic algorithm puzzles: the object model and namespaces, database access and query design, error and exception handling, security basics such as escaping and prepared statements, and how they navigate an unfamiliar codebase. Reading code they did not write is the skill that matters most on this kind of project, so we test for it directly.

Can we try a developer before committing to a longer engagement?

Yes. We usually suggest a small paid trial task on your actual codebase, so you can judge real working code, communication and estimates instead of a CV. Engagements are month to month after that, so you can scale up, scale down or stop without a fixed-term contract working against you.

Who owns the code and the intellectual property?

You do. All code, documentation and related work produced during the engagement belongs to you, and it is written into the agreement before work starts. Everything lives in your repository from day one, not on our machines.

Do you use AI tools when writing our code?

Yes, as part of the workflow rather than as a replacement for the developer. It is most useful for summarising unfamiliar legacy files, drafting tests around existing behaviour before a refactor, and flagging issues such as unescaped output, string-concatenated SQL, loose comparisons and N+1 queries during code review. A developer reviews, tests and owns every line that ships, and we are happy to follow any policy you have about AI use in your codebase.