London office · senior PHP team
Tech stack — Hire PHP developers in the UK

Hire PHP
developers in the UK.

Senior PHP engineers from London — Laravel, Symfony, native PHP 8.3, WordPress, Drupal. UK timezone, NDA on day 1, day rates from £450. 15 years building production PHP since 2010.

Updated June 24, 2026
Day rates
£450 – 720
Typical timeline
8 – 18 weeks
Team
2 – 5 senior people
Outcome
Production PHP delivered
Trusted by Danone Unilever Toyota Cisco AstraZeneca Veolia
58
Laravel apps shipped
32
Filament admin panels
18
Symfony deployments
120+
PHP engineers placed
What we offer

Senior PHP
engineering services.

Production PHP across the full stack — modern Laravel, enterprise Symfony, headless WordPress, Drupal for regulated sectors, and security audits on inherited PHP.

01 — Laravel

Laravel apps + Filament

Laravel 11, Filament 3 admin panels, Inertia + Vue or Livewire, queues + Horizon, Octane. See Laravel developers.

02 — Symfony

Symfony, enterprise-grade

Symfony 7 with API Platform, Doctrine, Messenger, DDD-shaped bounded contexts. Right for regulated and long-lived enterprise products.

03 — Native PHP

PHP 8.3 + modern OOP

Framework-free PHP 8.3 — readonly classes, enums, typed properties, PSR-everything. For libraries, packages and lean services.

04 — WordPress

WordPress, properly

Custom plugins, Gutenberg blocks, headless WP with REST or GraphQL, performance audits, security hardening. Not a "theme-clicker" shop.

05 — Drupal

Drupal for gov / enterprise

Drupal 10/11 for government, education and regulated CMS workloads. Multilingual, accessible, migration from legacy estates.

06 — PHP audit

Security & performance audit

PHPStan / Larastan, security review against OWASP top 10, dependency audit, query plan review. Written report with prioritised fix list.

How we hire

How we put
PHP teams together.

Same engineers from kickoff to handover. Weekly demos. No staff augmentation, no offshore rotation.

Pillar 01

Interview process

Three-stage process — technical pairing on a real PHP problem, product-fit conversation with a senior PO, and a cultural round. Same shortlist Magora itself hires from.

Pillar 02

On-boarding

NDA on day 1, codebase walkthrough in week 1, paired commits in week 2. 2 – 5 working days from offer to first PR for most engagements.

Pillar 03

Engagement

T&M or fixed-scope. Weekly demos, daily standups if you want them, Slack throughout. Same engineers throughout — no swap-outs after sales.

Process

Six steps to ship
production PHP.

From a fuzzy idea to a deployed PHP application, with a checkpoint at every stage.

Step 01

User research

1 – 2 weeks

User Research Mastery — define user roles, set expectations, conduct up to 10 impactful interviews. Insights become a roadmap rather than guesswork.

Interviews Personas Roadmap
Step 02

Product scope

1 week

Compelling user stories crafted with stakeholders. Domain model sketched, bounded contexts agreed, integrations enumerated before a line of PHP is written.

User stories Domain model Timeline
Step 03

Design

2 – 3 weeks

Robust UI designs for visual appeal or efficient UX prototypes for real user insights. Filament admins, Livewire screens, Blade components — all componentised from day one.

Figma Blade / Livewire Prototype
Step 04

Development

6 – 14 weeks

Agile development, two-week sprints, weekly demos. Pest / PHPUnit from the first commit, Larastan / PHPStan in CI, code review on every PR — same engineers throughout.

Pest · PHPUnit Larastan CI/CD
Step 05

QA

1 – 2 weeks

Rigorous testing in staging — dedicated QA engineers, regression suites, load testing where the use-case earns it. Each step a precision move toward a seamless user experience.

Dusk Behat Load testing
Step 06

Deployment

1 week

Zero-downtime deploys via Envoyer, Deployer or GitHub Actions. Canary releases where it matters, blue-green where it doesn't. Continuous monitoring and Sentry from go-live.

Envoyer · Deployer GitHub Actions Sentry
PHP tech stack

The actual
PHP stack.

What goes into a Magora PHP build — typed services, queues that survive deploys, and a domain model your team actually wants to extend.

Languages
  • PHP 8.3
  • SQL
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
Frameworks
  • Laravel 11
  • Symfony 7
  • Slim 4
  • Phalcon
CMS
  • WordPress
  • Drupal 10 / 11
  • October CMS
  • Headless / decoupled
Architecture
  • DDD
  • Hexagonal
  • Service + Repository
  • Bounded contexts
Async
  • Queues · Horizon
  • RabbitMQ
  • Messenger
  • Octane
Data
  • Eloquent
  • Doctrine
  • PostgreSQL · MySQL
  • Redis · Elasticsearch
Network
  • Sanctum
  • Passport · OAuth2
  • Stripe · GoCardless
  • Webhooks · SSE
Testing
  • Pest
  • PHPUnit
  • Behat
  • Larastan · PHPStan
Client reviews

What clients
say.

Pulled from independently-verified Clutch reviews — 60+ of them, 4.9 average.

"

The PHP team Magora put on us read our legacy Symfony codebase in a week and shipped the first refactor in week two. Senior engineering, no learning-on-our-dime.

Tom Crawford
CTO, B2B SaaS
"

NDA on day one, Filament admin in production by week three. Same engineers all the way through — exactly what we were promised at sales.

Hannah Reid
Founder, e-commerce
"

£540/day for a senior Laravel engineer who already knew Pest, Horizon and Octane on day one. Cheaper than the recruiter quotes we had been seeing.

Sergey K.
Director of Engineering, services group
Frequently asked

The honest
questions.

What's the day rate for a senior PHP developer in the UK?

Magora's published day rates for senior PHP engineers sit at £450 – 720 / day, depending on seniority and framework specialism. Laravel + Filament is at the lower end of that band, Symfony + DDD and PHP audit specialists are at the upper end.

That covers a UK-based, in-house, senior engineer who has been working in PHP for 6+ years, with English-law contracts and NDA from day one. Compare against our full pricing model.

Do you hire PHP developers as a team or individually?

Both, but team-led is our default. Magora's strongest delivery model is a small senior team — typically a senior PHP lead, 1 – 2 mid-senior engineers, a part-time PO and a part-time QA — owning the project end-to-end.

Single-engineer engagements work for narrow specialist work (an audit, a tricky Filament resource, a Symfony bundle). For anything where the brief will evolve, the team model holds up better over 6 – 18 months. Start with a Discovery sprint.

Which PHP frameworks do your developers cover?

The full modern PHP set: Laravel (with deep Filament + Inertia + Livewire expertise), Symfony (API Platform, Messenger, Doctrine), native PHP 8.3 for libraries and lean services, WordPress (custom plugins, Gutenberg, headless), and Drupal 10/11 for regulated CMS.

Microframeworks (Slim, Phalcon) for niche use-cases. We don't put juniors on framework-spanning work — the senior on the team owns the architectural choices.

Are your PHP developers UK-based?

Yes. Magora is headquartered in London (The Tea Building, 56 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6JJ). UK timezone, English-law contracts, NDA on day one. Legal entity is Thinking Fish Ltd, UK Companies House 03637036, founded 2010.

That matters for IP enforceability, GDPR accountability and being able to sit in the same standup as your in-house team. See our full London web development offer.

How fast can you onboard a PHP developer?

2 – 5 working days from offer to first commit for most engagements. NDA on day 1, codebase walkthrough in the first three days, paired commits in week 1, autonomous PRs by week 2.

For larger team builds (3+ engineers), allow 5 – 10 working days for ramp-up so the senior lead can scope the domain model before the rest of the team starts writing PHP.

Can I hire just one developer or do I need a team?

Both options are available. Single senior engineer engagements are common for audits, framework migrations, Filament resource work, or to plug a specific gap in your in-house team. Day rate £450 – 720, minimum 4 weeks.

Team engagements (2 – 5 people, senior-led) work better for full product builds, regulated platforms and anything where the brief will evolve. Start with a Discovery sprint if you're not sure which model fits.

Do you handle Magento or Shopify?

Magento — yes, primarily on the Laravel-side integration: webhooks, ledger sync, CRM mirror, order-pipeline automation. We don't position ourselves as a Magento theming shop, but we have senior PHP engineers who have shipped production Magento 2 work.

Shopify — yes, via Liquid + the Storefront API + headless Shopify with a Laravel or Symfony backend. For headless storefronts we typically build a thin PHP layer on top of the Storefront API. See bespoke software for the broader pattern.

Will the PHP developer integrate with my in-house team?

Yes — that's the default. UK timezone, daily standups, your Slack workspace, your Jira / Linear board, weekly demos with your stakeholders. The Magora engineer is on your repo and your tooling from day one.

For larger engagements we often run a hybrid model: the Magora senior lead pairs with your in-house lead, the rest of the team works as a pod. See our London web development page for the engagement patterns we run most often.

What's the minimum engagement length?

4 weeks. Anything shorter doesn't justify the ramp-up cost — even a senior engineer needs about a week to be fully productive in a new codebase.

For specific narrow tasks (a PHP security audit, a Filament resource build, a Symfony bundle) we can do fixed-scope engagements under 4 weeks — start with a Discovery call to scope the work properly.

How is IP ownership handled?

Full IP transfer on payment, English-law contract. IPR in bespoke software shall, without prejudice to our rights in pre-existing IPR, be transferred to you on payment of the requested amount relating to such work.

No "we retain rights to reuse code on non-competing projects" small print. Source code, designs and IP all transfer in full — Magora is Thinking Fish Ltd, UK Companies House 03637036, so the contract is enforceable in England without crossing a jurisdiction.

Need senior PHP
engineers now?

30-minute call with a senior Laravel / Symfony architect. We'll review your stack, scope and team needs — and tell you exactly which engineers we'd put on the project, at what day rate, starting which week.

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