Our new developers were able to hit the ground running, we've worked with them for over two years now, and they are truly part of our team.
Alison WhittleProduct Delivery Manager, BladeFSIn-house feel, nearshore
Laravel Developers
Our Laravel developers build, scale and maintain production PHP platforms as full-time members of your team. They work British hours, join your stand-ups and ship from week one, whether you are launching new features or modernising an ageing back end.
- Production Laravel and PHP experience, proven in vetting
- API-first architecture with real ownership of back end logic
- Embedded in your team, tools and sprint cadence on UK hours
Laravel Framework DepthRESTful & GraphQL APIsDatabase ManagementTesting & DebuggingDeployment & Scaling
Our Service
Laravel engineers who slot straight into your stack
Every developer is chosen for product awareness and clear written communication as much as for framework depth. Because Cloud Employee is the employer of record, you get a committed full-time engineer rather than a contractor, without the employment-status ambiguity that comes with UK freelance hiring.
- Aligned to your stack, your timezone and your release rhythm
- Experience across e-commerce, SaaS and internal tooling
- Fully embedded, fully supported by Cloud Employee
Fully embedded, fully supported by Cloud Employee
Back end confidence, delivered
- Laravel Framework DepthDeep Laravel 8/9+ knowledge covering Eloquent, service containers, queues and artisan.
- RESTful & GraphQL APIsWell-documented, performant endpoints designed to scale with your product.
- Database ManagementMySQL and PostgreSQL schema design, tuning and Laravel migrations handled properly.
- Authentication & SecurityLaravel Passport and Sanctum implementations aligned to OWASP practice.
- Testing & DebuggingUnit, feature and browser tests that protect your business logic.
- Deployment & ScalingCI/CD pipelines, Laravel Forge, Envoyer and confident server scaling.
The alternative
Get speed, fit and in-house feel without the hiring grind.
Cloud EmployeeIn-house hiringDev agenciesFreelancers
Speed to hire✓-✓✓
Flexibility to scale✓-✓✓
Developer fit (embedded)✓✓✓-
Full-time, only for you✓✓--
No overhead or upfront fees✓--✓
Solid lime = yes · outline lime = partial · grey dash = no
Vetting
You see two people - not 200 CVs.
Engineers vet engineers
A senior engineer runs a live technical conversation on the candidate's real stack, not a recruiter working from a keyword list.
Live coding, not take-homes
Real problems solved in front of an assessor, with anti-cheating checks. You see how they actually work, not what they submitted overnight.
A full profile, not a CV
Every candidate arrives with a CV, interview summary, coding-test breakdown and rate in pounds. You decide on evidence.
Every tab is a stage a candidate has to clear. Six of them, all run by our own internal engineers at Cloud Employee, before you see a name.
- Overview
- CV
- Tech interview
- Coding test
- Psychometric
- Soft skills
Scored by people. We use AI to cross-check our own consistency - never to decide who reaches your shortlist.
✓Luka M.
VettedSenior Laravel Engineer · Laravel · PHP · MySQL · 6 yrs · Zagreb, Croatia (GMT+1)
Assessment
Six years in production Python, the last three on LLM systems - retrieval pipelines, eval suites, and agent tooling for UK fintech. Owns delivery end to end.
Stack
Python · LangGraph
English
C1 fluent
Overlap
8 hrs UK
Notice
2 weeks
AI in practiceShips with Copilot and Claude Code daily, and rewrote 40% of the generated code in his observed task - the judgement is his, the tooling only makes him faster.
Career history
2023 - now
Senior AI Engineer
UK payments platform · 40-person product team
Built the retrieval assistant now resolving 30% of tier-1 tickets; owns its eval suite and guardrails.
2020 - 2023
Backend Engineer, Python
Travel booking SaaS · Zagreb
Moved fraud scoring onto a real-time feature pipeline; cut false declines by 18%.
2019 - 2020
Data Engineer
Agency · Python, Postgres, AWS
- Python
- FastAPI
- LangGraph
- pgvector
- Evals & tracing
- AWS
- Docker
Technical interview
Assessed by Marco R., Principal Engineer
12 Jun 2026
55 min · live call
"Walked me through an assistant that was quietly hallucinating refund policy, how he caught it in evals, and what he got wrong on the first fix. Hire-ready for a senior seat."
Live coding test
Fix an N+1 query in a live endpoint
88
score
Tests passed
21 / 21
Time used
62 of 90 min
Anti-cheat flags
0
retrieval.py · submitted diff
- hits = index.query(q, k=50)+ hits = index.query(rewrite(q), k=50, filter=tenant)+ hits = rerank(hits, q)[:8] # recall 0.62 -> 0.91+ assert_context_budget(hits, max_tokens=6000)
Psychometric · technical thinking
How he reasons under a real deadline - not a personality quiz.
Top 9%of engineers
we test
A 45-minute reasoning test, scored against the 4,000+ engineers we have already placed. Our assessors do the marking - AI only flags where our own scoring looks inconsistent.
Soft skills · working with your team
Spoken English
C1 · assessed on call
References
2 of 2 verified
"He raised the payment edge case nobody else had spotted, in writing, two days before release."
This is what you receive - not a CV.
Ask our AI anythingWhy Cloud Employee?
Laravel developers who stay and keep shipping
We embed engineers as if they were already on your payroll, then keep them. 97% stay beyond two years, backed by a £1,000 annual learning budget and dedicated Talent Success Managers. Long-term value at 50-75% less than hiring the same seniority in the UK.
- Fully embedded engineers, never freelancers
- Vetted for Laravel depth and team fit in live pair programming
- HR, payroll, retention and equipment handled for you
Not just a developer, a whole operation behind them
Everything around your Laravel developer is handled, so they can focus on shipping.
Fully supported
We handle the rest so your engineers can focus on building.
Performance reviews
Payroll & complianceEquipment
WorkspaceIn-house, without the friction
No upfront fees. No lock-in contracts.
- No placement or upfront fees
- Rolling 30-day contract, cancel anytime
- One monthly rate, everything included
Ready to find your engineer?
Tell us exactly who you need.
In 90 seconds
Two matched engineers in 7 days. No fees, no obligation.
What role are you hiring for?
Pick one to start - you'll see matching engineers at the end.
- Founded in 2014
- 97% stay 2+ years
- Replace if it isn't working
Got questions?
The questions CTOs and founders ask.
01How much does it cost to hire a Laravel developer in the UK?
Around 50 to 75% less than a like-for-like British hire once salary, employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees and overheads are counted. A UK-based Laravel developer is on the table and we place them regularly. Most teams choose otherwise because Eastern Europe, the Philippines and Latin America deliver the same standard for less, and Eastern Europe sits roughly an hour from London. Senior Laravel engineers in Britain are scarcer than the framework's popularity suggests, and much of the experienced pool sits inside agencies charging project rates. You pay one monthly fee, no placement charge.
02What is Laravel and why do teams choose it?
Laravel is the dominant PHP framework, a batteries-included toolkit for building web applications quickly, with an unusually complete answer to authentication, queues, caching and testing out of the box. Teams choose it because the distance from idea to working product is short and conventions are strong enough that any Laravel developer can read any Laravel codebase. Eloquent makes database work pleasant, and the queue system makes background jobs genuinely easy. The trade-offs are PHP's outdated reputation and the framework's magic, which lets beginners build things they do not understand. It suits content-driven products and SaaS, not heavy real-time systems.
03What skills should I look for in a Laravel developer now?
Eloquent literacy, queue design and security instincts separate serious Laravel developers from framework tourists, and none of the three can be delegated to an AI assistant. Look for someone who can explain when Eloquent's convenience becomes an N+1 query problem, who designs background jobs to be retried safely, and who treats validation and authorisation as architecture, not afterthoughts. A testing habit matters more here than in most stacks, since the framework's magic makes untested code look finished. Assistants generate Laravel scaffolding well, so the skill has shifted to reviewing that output and catching the query it actually runs.
04How do I assess a Laravel developer, and what should I ask?
Have them review real code rather than solve puzzles, because Laravel competence is mostly visible in what someone notices. Put a controller in front of them with an N+1 query, a missing authorisation check and a background job that breaks on retry, and see which of the three they find. Ask how they would take a feature from request to queued work, and where validation and failure handling live along the way. Let them keep their AI assistant on, the point is what they do next, not whether code appears quickly. Candidates worth hiring read the query with suspicion first.
05Are Laravel developers in demand, and is it worth building on?
Yes, Laravel demand runs deep through product companies, agencies and the long tail of businesses whose software lives on the web, though it is quieter than JavaScript fashion. Worth building on is an easy yes for a SaaS, marketplace or content platform where shipping features weekly matters more than exotic performance, and the framework's maturity means solved problems stay solved. If your product is real-time collaboration or heavy computation, Laravel is a supporting actor at best. AI tooling has been kind to it too, its conventions make generated code unusually reliable, compounding the speed advantage that drew teams.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
They do, and Laravel is arguably where AI assistance works best, which makes the reviewing discipline more important rather than less. Because the framework is so convention-driven, generated code frequently looks production-ready, and the failure modes hide underneath, in the queries Eloquent will actually run, in authorisation never checked, in jobs that misbehave on retry. When we assess whether a candidate uses AI tooling well, we are watching for exactly that suspicion. A developer who cannot work without the assistant cannot review with it either. We run the same policy internally, keeping every decision human.
07How does Cloud Employee vet Laravel developers?
Laravel candidates face a CTO-led process, a technical assessment, live pair programming with a senior engineer, a cultural fit screen and a psychometric assessment built for software engineers. The pairing is framework-specific, watching how they handle Eloquent, queues and authorisation on realistic code, since that is where Laravel quality lives. We test directly how well a candidate works with AI tools, rather than take it on trust. Our own hiring uses AI for screening and matching, with a human making the final call. 97% of engineers stay beyond two years, each with a learning budget.
08How quickly can a developer start, and how does the engagement work?
You are typically interviewing matched candidates within 7 working days of a requirements call, and developers are often embedded and pushing code within about two weeks. From there it is a rolling monthly contract with 30 days' notice, one monthly fee, and no placement charges. You can scale up or down as the work changes, and you pay nothing to interview.
09What happens if the developer is not the right fit?
There is a two-week money-back guarantee, and if you want to continue we replace the developer free of charge. In practice this rarely comes up, because you interview a shortlist of two candidates who have already passed a CTO-led technical assessment and a live pair programming session, so the fit question is largely settled before anyone starts.
Proof, not promises
Hear from our customers
In their words
What the difference feels like
Alison WhittleProduct Delivery Manager, BladeFSWhat I love about Cloud Employee is that you have taken all of that hard work off my shoulders.
Marcus KilgourCTO, Salmon SoftwareWorking with Cloud Employee developers is great, because they're not afraid to push back. They're proactive, they're positive, and they feel like part of the team.
Doran EskinaziHead of Engineering, HealthpointeWe actually hired the whole team remotely, having never met them. And we made a bunch of really good hires.
Euan CameronCEO, WilloCloud Employee provides a level of professionalism, communication and support we haven't found elsewhere.
Trevor SathorManaging Director, Square EyeWorking in tandem with Cloud Employee we have successfully released a major version of our main software product during a critical period for us.
James StringerManaging Director, CleanLink