How to Hire a Laravel Developer (Without Getting Burned)

Hiring a Laravel developer is one of those things that looks easy on paper and turns into a nightmare in practice.

You post a job, get 40 applicants, interview a few, pick someone who seems confident, and three months later your codebase is a mess of undocumented controllers, no tests, and a deployment process that lives entirely in one person's head.

I have seen this happen dozens of times. I have also been the Laravel developer on the other side of that hire. Here is what actually matters.

What good Laravel developers actually look like

The PHP world has a reputation problem. Because PHP has such a low barrier to entry, there are a lot of people who technically know Laravel but have never worked on a project that needed to scale, handle real traffic, or get maintained by someone other than themselves.

The signal I look for is not years of experience or the number of projects on a portfolio. It is how they talk about tradeoffs.

Ask them: "When would you not use Eloquent?" If they stare at you blankly, that is a red flag. Good Laravel developers know when the ORM is the right tool and when a raw query or a different pattern makes more sense. They have hit the limits of the defaults and thought about what comes next.

Ask them: "How do you handle queued jobs that fail?" The answer reveals a lot about how they think about reliability. Retries, dead letter queues, monitoring - this is where real production experience shows.

The hiring mistakes that keep repeating

Hiring for framework knowledge instead of engineering fundamentals. Laravel is a great framework, but it does not teach you how to build software. Someone who has been copying patterns from tutorials for three years is not the same as someone who understands why those patterns exist and when to break them.

Skipping a paid trial project. Interviews are bad at predicting performance. A small paid test - a real task from your backlog, not a made-up exercise - tells you far more in a few days than weeks of interviews. If a candidate refuses a paid trial, that tells you something too.

Letting the most confident person win. Confidence in interviews and quality in code have almost no correlation. The best developers I have worked with are often the ones who say "I am not sure, let me think about that" rather than the ones who have an immediate answer to everything.

Not checking how they handle legacy code. Most real projects are not greenfields. Ask them to walk through a messy codebase and explain what they would do. Refactoring instinct and patience with existing code is a completely different skill from building new things.

What you actually need from a Laravel developer in 2026

If you are building anything serious, your Laravel developer needs to be comfortable with more than just the framework.

They should understand queue workers and horizon. They should have worked with Livewire or Inertia, not just blade templates. They should know how to write feature tests that actually catch regressions. They should understand how to structure a Laravel app for a team, not just for themselves - which means things like service classes, form requests, and API resources used consistently, not mixed randomly with fat controllers.

The other thing that matters more now than it did a few years ago: API design. Laravel is increasingly used as a backend with a separate frontend. A Laravel developer who has only built monoliths may struggle with the different mental model that comes with building a clean API consumed by a React or Vue frontend.

The alternative to the full-time hire

Full-time Laravel hires are slow, expensive, and risky if you are not sure what you need yet.

Staff augmentation - bringing in a senior Laravel developer for a defined engagement - lets you move fast without the commitment. You get someone experienced, available within days, and accountable to outcomes rather than just showing up every day.

That is the model we use at SimplyShip. If you need a senior Laravel developer now, let us know. We can usually have someone embedded in your project within the week.