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
PHP Developers
Senior PHP engineers working British hours on applications that are already earning. A large share of UK business software runs on PHP, and modern PHP is a different language from the one that earned its reputation.
- Laravel or Symfony, matched to your codebase
- At home in framework-free legacy as well
- Working your hours and embedded in your team
Legacy System SupportAPI DevelopmentBackend ArchitectureDatabase OptimizationTesting & CI/CD
Our service
PHP engineers embedded in your UK team
Plenty of profitable British systems are plain PHP written over a decade by people who have since left. Reading unfamiliar code is a separate skill from writing new code, so we vet on it rather than assuming it. Cloud Employee is the employer of record, so you get an employee rather than a contractor.
- Version upgrades completed, not just read about
- MySQL or PostgreSQL and deployment alongside
- Full-time engineers, never freelancers
Full-time engineers, never freelancers
Full-stack PHP expertise
- Skilled in Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, and other modern PHP stacks.
- Legacy System SupportMaintain and improve existing codebases without disruption.
- API DevelopmentBuild robust REST and GraphQL APIs to power your frontend and mobile apps.
- Backend ArchitectureDesign scalable, modular backend systems aligned with your product needs.
- Database OptimizationOptimize MySQL and PostgreSQL performance and queries for scale.
- Testing & CI/CDEngineers who bake in tests and deploy cleanly via automated pipelines.
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 PHP Engineer · PHP · Laravel · 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
Engineers who inherit well and stay
An engineer who has learned a decade-old codebase is worth keeping, and replacing them means paying for that learning twice. 97% stay beyond two years, backed by a 1,000 pound annual learning budget, at 50 to 75% less than a comparable British hire.
- Vetted on maintaining code, not only writing it
- Working your hours and ready for daily stand-ups
- Retention and operations support after the hire
More than developers
We manage hiring, onboarding and retention, with a UK-based account manager as your point of contact.
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 PHP developer in the UK?
For most roles, 50 to 75% less than the full cost of a comparable British hire, including salary, employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees and overheads. Yes, we place UK-based PHP developers. The majority of our clients still end up in Eastern Europe, the Philippines or Latin America, because the talent is comparable and the price is not. The model exists to give you the strongest quality-to-cost ratio we can find, where the engineer sits is how, not why. Britain runs an enormous amount of PHP, yet developers fluent in modern practice are scarce.
02What is PHP and why do teams still choose it?
PHP is the server-side language behind an enormous share of the web, including WordPress and mature frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony. Teams choose it because modern PHP is a genuinely capable typed language, because hosting and hiring around it are mature, and mostly because their revenue already runs on it. Rewriting a working PHP system in a fashionable stack is one of the most reliable ways to burn a year, so the pragmatic move is usually to keep improving what earns the money. The ecosystem also carries decades of tutorials teaching bad habits.
03What skills should I look for in a PHP developer now?
Look for someone fluent in modern PHP, typed and tested, who can also read the untyped legacy code your system probably contains. Framework depth in Laravel or Symfony matters less than knowing where framework magic ends and your domain logic should begin. Ask about database judgement, because most real PHP performance problems live in queries, not the language. AI assistants generate passable PHP instantly, so the scarce skill is knowing which of five working solutions will still be maintainable years later.
04How do I assess a PHP developer, and what should I ask?
Put real legacy code in front of them and ask what they would change first, in what order, and what they would deliberately leave alone. That single exercise separates maintainers from rewriters faster than any quiz. Ask how they would add tests to code written without them, and what they check before upgrading a framework major version. If they use an AI assistant, and most now do, ask them to critique its output on your code, the signal is whether they catch its mistakes about your domain.
05Are PHP developers in demand, and is it worth building on?
Demand is steady rather than fashionable, which works in your favour as an employer. An enormous installed base of WordPress, Laravel and bespoke PHP systems needs maintaining and extending for decades to come, while the loudest hiring competition has moved to newer stacks. For an existing PHP system the answer is almost always yes, keep building, because the business value sits in the working code you already own. AI tooling now flattens the routine work, scaffolding and boilerplate, so a developer's value concentrates in architecture.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
They do, and in a mature ecosystem like PHP the risk is specific, assistants trained on twenty years of tutorials will happily generate outdated patterns that run fine and age badly. So we test for editorial judgement. During vetting we assess whether candidates use AI tooling well, and in the live pair programming session a senior engineer watches whether they accept generated code uncritically or interrogate it. We apply the same principle to ourselves, using AI for screening and matching while a human decides.
07How does Cloud Employee vet PHP developers?
Our vetting is led by CTOs, not recruiters, which is the only way to catch the difference between someone who has used Laravel and someone who understands it. PHP candidates sit a technical assessment, then pair live with a senior engineer, where habits around testing and legacy handling show themselves quickly. We screen for cultural fit with British teams and run a psychometric assessment we built for software engineers. You interview matched candidates within 7 working days, and your developer is embedded in about two weeks, with a two-week money-back guarantee behind the match.
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