Laravel Developers Who Write Queries That Scale
PHP and Laravel engineers screened on the things that actually break in production: Eloquent query performance, queue and job design, and test coverage on business logic.
What should you screen Laravel developers for?
Screen for database awareness above all: Eloquent makes N+1 query problems very easy to write and invisible until traffic arrives, so a candidate should be able to detect and fix them. Beyond that, look for queue and background-job design, caching strategy, testing discipline on business logic rather than only routes, and experience modernising older PHP or legacy Laravel versions. Anviam provides Laravel engineers screened on these areas, onboarded in five to ten business days on a rolling monthly term.
- Time to onboard
- 5–10 business days
- Engagement models
- Full-time, part-time or project-based
- Minimum term
- 1 month, rolling
- Overlap hours
- 4+ hours with US, UK and AU time zones
- Trial period
- Two-week replacement window
- Reporting
- Direct access, your tools, your standups
Eloquent Makes It Easy to Write a Query That Runs 400 Times
Laravel is a genuinely productive framework and Eloquent is a large part of why. It is also the source of the most predictable performance problem we see in Laravel applications: a loop over a collection that lazily loads a relationship, producing hundreds of queries where one would do. It works fine with test data and falls over the first time a real dataset arrives, and it is invisible unless someone is watching query counts.
So database awareness is the first screening filter. Can the candidate spot an N+1 in a code review, do they know how to find one with query logging or a profiler, and do they reach for eager loading before adding a cache to hide the problem? After that we look at queue design, since long-running work in a request cycle is the second most common issue, and at whether tests cover business logic rather than just asserting that a route returns 200.
What Our Laravel Developers Cover
The areas that determine whether a Laravel application holds up under real traffic.
Eloquent & Query Performance
Eager loading, index-aware queries and finding N+1 problems before they reach production.
API Development
Versioned REST APIs with resources, form request validation, rate limiting and consistent error shapes.
Queues & Scheduled Jobs
Background job design with retries, idempotency and failure handling rather than fire-and-forget.
Caching Strategy
Redis caching applied deliberately, with invalidation thought through rather than blanket TTLs.
Testing
Pest or PHPUnit feature and unit tests covering business rules, not only HTTP status codes.
Legacy PHP Modernisation
Upgrading old PHP and Laravel versions, and moving non-framework legacy PHP onto Laravel incrementally.
PHP & Laravel Stack We Staff
When to Hire Laravel Developers
Fast Product Build
Laravel's conventions make it one of the quickest routes from idea to working web product.
API Back End
A back end serving mobile apps or a separate front end, where Laravel is a pragmatic choice.
Legacy PHP Rescue
Old CodeIgniter, CakePHP or bespoke PHP applications needing a supported footing.
Performance Problems
A Laravel application slowing under load, usually from query patterns rather than hardware.
Commerce & Marketplace
Multi-vendor platforms with payments, where Laravel's ecosystem covers much of the work.
Team Capacity
An existing PHP team needing additional senior capability for a delivery push.
The Terms, in Writing
Most problems with contract engineering come from things nobody agreed in advance. These are ours, contractually, for every role.
Talk to Our Team- You interview every candidate and can decline anyone, with no pressure to accept a shortlist
- Engineers are our salaried employees, dedicated to you alone and never split across clients
- Replacement within two weeks at our cost if someone is not working out
- Rolling one-month term with 30 days' notice, no exit fee and no minimum contract length
- Code stays in your repository and your cloud accounts throughout the engagement
- Four or more hours of daily overlap with your working hours as standard
From Request to Contributing Engineer
Role Brief
A short call on the stack, seniority, domain and team context, then a written role summary.
Profiles Within 3–5 Days
Matched candidate profiles with real project history, not anonymised generic CVs.
You Interview
Technical and cultural interviews on your own process. Decline anyone, and we send more.
Onboard in 5–10 Days
Access, environment setup, codebase walkthrough and a first small ticket shipped in week one.
Work in Your Cadence
Your board, your standups, your review standards, reporting to your lead rather than to us.
Common Questions About Hiring Laravel Developers
Is Laravel a good choice for a serious production application?
Yes, for a wide range of web applications and APIs. Laravel is mature, well documented, has an unusually good ecosystem for queues, scheduling and admin tooling, and its conventions mean a new engineer becomes productive quickly. Where it is a weaker fit is very high-throughput low-latency services and heavy computational work, where a compiled language or an async runtime suits better. For typical business applications the productivity is worth more than the theoretical performance gap.
Can you modernise our old PHP application?
Yes, and incrementally. Legacy PHP applications, whether bespoke or on CodeIgniter or CakePHP, can usually be brought forward by routing new features through Laravel while the old code keeps serving existing routes, then migrating area by area. The first priority is normally getting off an unsupported PHP version, since that is where the security exposure sits, and that can often be done ahead of any architectural work.
How do you test for database competence in interviews?
We give candidates a small Laravel codebase containing a deliberate N+1 problem and a missing index, and ask them to find and fix the performance issue. It is a realistic task and it separates candidates quickly: some spot it in minutes by enabling query logging, others add a cache without understanding the cause. We follow up on queue design and transaction handling, since those are the next two areas where production problems originate.
Should we use Livewire, Inertia or a separate front end?
It depends on your team. Livewire suits teams who are strongest in PHP and want interactivity without a separate front-end codebase. Inertia suits teams comfortable with React or Vue who want SPA behaviour while keeping Laravel routing and controllers. A fully separate front end makes sense when you have a dedicated front-end team or need to serve mobile clients from the same API. We recommend based on who will maintain it rather than on what is fashionable.
Can Laravel developers also work on our front end?
Many are comfortable with Blade, Livewire, Alpine and moderate Vue or React work, which covers most Laravel applications. For a demanding front end — a design system, complex state, strict accessibility requirements — a dedicated front-end engineer is the better hire. We are explicit about where a Laravel engineer's front-end capability ends rather than overstating breadth and disappointing you in sprint three.
Do you provide DevOps support for Laravel deployment?
Our Laravel engineers handle standard deployment on Forge, Vapor or a containerised setup, including queue workers, scheduled tasks, zero-downtime deploys and basic monitoring. For substantial infrastructure work — Kubernetes, multi-region, complex CI/CD — we would add a platform engineer rather than stretching a Laravel developer into a role they will do adequately at best.