Hire Laravel Developers
Laravel is a genuinely good framework with an unusual hiring problem: the PHP pool contains a wide range of eras, and a developer whose habits come from PHP in 2012 writes very different code from one working in modern Laravel.
Discuss your projectThe era question
PHP has changed substantially — typed properties, enums, readonly, proper dependency injection — and Laravel has moved with it. A developer who has kept current writes code that is testable, typed and maintainable. One whose practice dates from earlier writes procedural code inside controllers, queries built by string concatenation, and business logic in Blade templates. Both will tell you they know Laravel.
This matters more than framework version familiarity, because the habits are harder to change than the syntax. It is also the single most useful thing to screen for, and it is easy to detect in a code exercise: ask for a small feature and look at where the logic ends up and whether anything is typed.
The same question applies to the codebase you are hiring for. A great deal of work advertised as Laravel is actually maintaining an older PHP application with Laravel bolted around part of it. That is legitimate work and a different job, and we would rather establish which you have at scoping than place someone expecting a modern codebase.
What to interview for
Laravel-specific signals, in rough order of how much they predict code quality.
- The N+1 query problem in Eloquent. Ask them to spot it in a loop over a relationship and fix it with eager loading. Eloquent makes this extremely easy to cause and this single issue accounts for most Laravel performance problems. A developer who cannot explain it has not been responsible for a production database.
- Where business logic belongs. A developer who puts everything in controllers has not maintained a large Laravel application. Services, actions, form requests — any considered structure is fine, and fat controllers are a reliable negative signal.
- Queues. Whether they have used them in production, and what happens when a job fails or is retried. Anything slow — email, reports, external API calls — belongs in a queue, and a developer who runs those in the request has not dealt with timeouts.
- Migrations on large tables, and how they would avoid locking one. Separates developers who have deployed from those who have only developed locally.
- Testing with Laravel's own tooling, which is good and widely skipped. Ask what they test and what they deliberately do not.
- Front-end approach and whether they have a position: Blade with Livewire, Inertia with Vue or React, or a separate SPA. Each is reasonable; having no view suggests they have not had to choose.
- PHP version currency. Whether they use typed properties and enums, or write as though it were PHP 5. The most informative question on this list.
What they work on
Business applications
Laravel's strongest case — CRUD-heavy applications with authentication, permissions and admin interfaces, where it is extremely productive.
APIs
REST backends for mobile apps or front ends, with Laravel's resource and authentication tooling doing most of the work.
Maintaining and extending existing applications
The largest share of Laravel hiring. Often includes bringing an older application up to a supported framework and PHP version.
Legacy PHP modernisation
Older applications moved incrementally toward modern Laravel, which is covered on our modernisation page and is a different job from greenfield work.
Common questions
Related in Staff Augmentation
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