Top 12 Senior Php Developer Skills to Put on Your Resume
In today's job market, a senior PHP developer needs a resume that tells a clear story: deep technical mastery, sharp architectural judgment, and the soft skills that keep teams humming. Below, you’ll find the top 12 skills to highlight, plus practical ways to sharpen them so your experience reads as seasoned rather than stale.
Senior PHP Developer Skills
1. Laravel
Laravel is a modern, open-source PHP framework following the MVC pattern. It emphasizes expressiveness, developer happiness, and speed, with batteries included for routing, authentication, queues, caching, events, and more.
Why It's Important
For a senior PHP developer, Laravel provides a cohesive ecosystem and opinionated conventions that accelerate delivery, enforce best practices, and simplify maintenance at scale.
How to Improve Laravel Skills
Level up by going beyond the basics:
Eloquent mastery: Think beyond CRUD—custom casts, scoped queries, chunking, lazy/explicit eager loading, DTOs, and aggregates that won’t melt your DB.
Architecture patterns: Apply domain boundaries, action classes, service layers, events/listeners, and pipelines. Keep controllers skinny, logic testable.
Testing as a habit: Feature and unit tests with PHPUnit or Pest, factories and seeders, database transactions, and parallel test runs for speed.
Performance: Cache tags, route/config/opcache preloading, Horizon for queues, Octane for high-throughput apps, and database indexing that matches real queries.
Security: Rate limits, CSRF, authorization policies, guarded attributes, encryption, and timely dependency updates.
Packages: Build and maintain reusable packages with solid semver and CI. Document them like you mean it.
Deployment: Zero-downtime deploys, environment-specific config, robust logging, and observability. Consider serverless with Vapor if it fits your model.
Stay current: Track Laravel 11 changes, framework deprecations, and ecosystem tools (Scout, Socialite, Sanctum, Telescope).
How to Display Laravel Skills on Your Resume
2. Symfony
Symfony is a mature PHP framework and a rich set of decoupled components. It emphasizes flexibility, strong conventions, and long-term support releases suitable for enterprise-scale applications.
Why It's Important
Symfony brings composable building blocks, reliable release cadence, and guardrails for maintainable, well-architected systems.
How to Improve Symfony Skills
Dependency Injection: Service design, autowiring, attributes, environment-specific configs. Keep service boundaries tidy.
Flex and Recipes: Streamline setup, reduce boilerplate, and lean on community conventions without hand-rolling everything.
Performance: Use the profiler, prune N+1 queries in Doctrine, HTTP caching, opcache preloading, and smart pagination. Measure before tuning.
Testing: Unit, functional, and API tests wired into CI. Fixtures and test containers for fast, deterministic runs.
Advanced components: Messenger (async & transports), Workflow, Notifier, HttpClient. Use the right tool from the suite.
Security: Authenticators, voters, CSRF, rate limits, and careful input validation. Keep secrets out of code.
Versions: Track Symfony 7.x features while respecting 6.4 LTS stability in long-lived projects.
How to Display Symfony Skills on Your Resume
3. PHPUnit
PHPUnit is the standard unit testing framework for PHP. It verifies small pieces of behavior quickly, enabling fearless refactoring and safer releases.
Why It's Important
Automated tests catch regressions early, lock in expected behavior, and make change less risky. Confidence breeds speed.
How to Improve PHPUnit Skills
Core fluency: Data providers, setup/teardown, test doubles, and clear naming that explains intent.
Mocking: Lean on PHPUnit’s built-ins; isolate I/O and side effects. Test contracts, not implementation details.
Coverage and gaps: Use coverage tooling (Xdebug or PCOV) to spot blind spots. Don’t chase 100%—prioritize critical paths.
Parallelization: Speed up suites with tools like ParaTest. Keep tests hermetic to avoid flakiness.
CI first: Wire tests into GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins. Fast feedback beats big-bang testing at release time.
Maintainability: Small, focused tests; builders/factories for fixtures; avoid brittle assertions tied to internals.
Stay updated: Track PHPUnit 10/11 changes and deprecations; keep configs modern.
How to Display PHPUnit Skills on Your Resume
4. MySQL
MySQL is a widely used relational database. It powers transactional workloads with ACID guarantees and the familiarity of SQL.
Why It's Important
It underpins core business data. A senior developer shapes schemas, queries, and operations to keep apps fast and stable.
How to Improve MySQL Skills
Indexing done right: Composite indexes that match query patterns, covering indexes, and careful avoidance of redundant ones.
Query optimization: Prefer explicit columns over SELECT *. Use EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE to dismantle slow paths. Kill accidental N+1.
Configuration: Tune innodb_buffer_pool_size, innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit, tmp_table_size/max_heap_table_size, and connection limits based on workload.
Schema design: Appropriate normalization, pragmatic denormalization for read-heavy hotspots, correct data types, and sane defaults.
Caching: MySQL 8 no longer has a query cache—push caching up a layer with Redis or Memcached and use HTTP cache semantics where possible.
Maintenance: Enable slow query logs, add proper observability, and run regular analyze/optimize where it helps. Archive aged data.
How to Display MySQL Skills on Your Resume
5. MongoDB
MongoDB is a document database that stores JSON-like documents. It thrives on flexible schemas, hierarchical data, and quick iteration.
Why It's Important
Great for event data, catalogs, logs, or polymorphic structures where relational models get contorted.
How to Improve MongoDB Skills
Index strategy: Build targeted indexes, compound indexes in the correct key order, and partial indexes to cut noise.
Query analysis: Use explain plans and shape queries to return only needed fields. Avoid full collection scans.
Aggregation framework: Move heavy lifting server-side: grouping, filtering, projections, and transformations at scale.
Sharding: Choose sensible shard keys, balance evenly, and understand cross-shard trade-offs.
Driver and pooling: Keep the PHP driver current; connection pooling and timeouts configured for your traffic shape.
Data lifecycle: TTL indexes, capped collections where appropriate, backups and point-in-time recovery ready to go.
Security: Strong auth, least-privilege roles, encryption at rest and in transit, and regular audits.
How to Display MongoDB Skills on Your Resume
6. RESTful APIs
RESTful APIs expose resources over HTTP using verbs like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. They aim for statelessness, clear resource modeling, and predictable status codes, most often exchanging JSON.
Why It's Important
They are the backbone for web, mobile, and partner integrations. Clean contracts reduce friction and foster scale.
How to Improve RESTful APIs Skills
Design first: Model resources and relationships carefully. Use OpenAPI specs to document and drive implementation.
Correct semantics: Proper methods and status codes, idempotency where needed, and helpful error payloads.
Performance: Pagination (cursor-based where possible), filtering, sparse fieldsets, compression, and ETags for caching.
Security: OAuth2/OIDC, HTTPS everywhere, strict input validation, rate limits, and audit logging.
Versioning: Clear version strategy (path or header) with deprecation timelines that don’t surprise consumers.
Observability: Correlation IDs, structured logs, metrics, and tracing to diagnose issues fast.
Testing: Contract tests, scenario tests, and sandbox environments that mirror production constraints.
How to Display RESTful APIs Skills on Your Resume
7. Docker
Docker packages applications and dependencies into containers. The payoff is consistency across machines and environments with fewer “works on my machine” headaches.
Why It's Important
You ship faster with reproducible builds, simpler onboarding, and dependable deployments across dev, staging, and prod.
How to Improve Docker Skills
Tight images: Multi-stage builds, minimal base images, .dockerignore, and layer caching that actually caches.
Compose v2: Define multi-service stacks declaratively; healthchecks and dependencies spelled out.
BuildKit: Faster, more secure builds, secrets at build time, and better caching semantics.
Security: Non-root users, read-only filesystems where feasible, frequent image scanning, and secret management done right.
Networking and storage: Named volumes for persistence, sensible network boundaries, and resource limits that prevent noisy neighbors.
Observability: Per-container logs, metrics, and profiling to spot hotspots early.
How to Display Docker Skills on Your Resume
8. Git
Git is a distributed version control system. It tracks changes, supports branching and merging, and lets teams collaborate without stepping on each other.
Why It's Important
It protects your history, enforces process, and keeps complex codebases manageable.
How to Improve Git Skills
Branching strategies: Trunk-based or GitHub Flow for speed; long-lived branches only where justified.
Rebase with care: Interactive rebase for clean histories, squash noisy commits, and avoid rewriting shared history.
Hooks and automation: Pre-commit linting, tests on push, commit-msg validation (Conventional Commits if it suits the team).
Code reviews that help: Small PRs, clear diffs, and templates that focus on behavior, risks, and test coverage.
Security: Signed commits and protected branches. No secrets in history—ever.
Tooling: Learn both CLI and a GUI for complex visualizations when it helps untangle merges.
How to Display Git Skills on Your Resume
9. JavaScript
JavaScript powers interactivity in the browser and, with Node.js, runs on the server too. It pairs with PHP to deliver rich, responsive experiences.
Why It's Important
Full-stack fluency lets you shape features end to end—less back-and-forth, tighter feedback loops, faster delivery.
How to Improve JavaScript Skills
Modern language features: ES2023+ syntax, modules, async/await, generators, and the event loop’s quirks.
TypeScript: Static types make large frontends calmer and safer. Gradual adoption works well.
Framework familiarity: React, Vue, or Svelte—know at least one deeply. Patterns transfer.
Asynchronous patterns: Promises, concurrency limits, cancellation, and streaming.
Tooling: Vite, ESM-first bundling, ESLint, Prettier, and test runners that don’t drag their feet.
APIs and fetch: Robust request flows, retries, backoff, and graceful error surfaces.
How to Display JavaScript Skills on Your Resume
10. Vue.js
Vue.js is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Vue 3 centers on the Composition API, first-class TypeScript support, and a nimble runtime.
Why It's Important
Vue integrates smoothly with PHP backends, making it easy to bolt modern interactivity onto established applications or go full SPA when needed.
How to Improve Vue.js Skills
Composition API: Reusable logic via composables, script setup, and precise reactivity control.
State management: Prefer Pinia for Vue 3; keep stores lean and typed where possible.
Routing: Vue Router v4 with lazy loading and guards for auth-heavy apps.
Build tooling: Vite for fast dev cycles, environment handling, and code splitting.
SSR and islands: Nuxt 3 for SSR/SSG and hybrid architectures. Choose what the UX demands.
Quality: ESLint, unit tests with Vitest/Jest, component testing with Testing Library, and visual regression if UI is critical.
How to Display Vue.js Skills on Your Resume
11. Redis
Redis is an in-memory data store used for caching, queues, sessions, pub/sub, and fast counters. It’s simple, ferociously quick, and versatile.
Why It's Important
Offload hot reads, keep sessions snappy, and coordinate real-time features without hammering your primary database.
How to Improve Redis Skills
Pick the right structures: Strings for simple caching, hashes for objects, sets/sorted sets for membership and ranking, streams for event logs.
Connection strategy: Persistent connections, sane timeouts, and pooled clients (phpredis or predis) to trim latency.
Caching patterns: Cache-aside for most cases, write-through or write-behind where consistency requirements demand it. Use TTLs and invalidation strategies that match reality.
Scripting and atomics: Lua scripts to bundle operations, avoid race conditions, and cut round-trips.
Operations: Monitor latency, hits/misses, memory fragmentation, and eviction policy. Size keys thoughtfully.
Reliability: Sentinel for HA or Redis Cluster for scale-out. Backups and disaster recovery that actually get tested.
Security: Network isolation, ACLs, TLS, and no public exposure. Ever.
How to Display Redis Skills on Your Resume
12. Composer
Composer manages PHP dependencies. It locks versions, wires autoloading, and helps keep projects reproducible across machines.
Why It's Important
Modern PHP runs on packages. Composer is how you keep that ecosystem tidy and secure.
How to Improve Composer Skills
Version constraints: Understand caret and tilde ranges, stability flags, and prefer-stable to avoid surprise upgrades.
Lock file discipline: Commit composer.lock for apps; update intentionally, not accidentally.
Autoloading: PSR-4 namespaces, classmaps for legacy, and optimized autoload for production.
Scripts and hooks: Automate code style, tests, and static analysis on install/update without extra steps.
Security: Run composer audit regularly and prune vulnerable packages quickly.
Performance: Use prefer-dist, cache Composer directories in CI, and keep vendors lean.
Private packages: Host internal libraries in private repositories or artifact registries with proper access controls.
How to Display Composer Skills on Your Resume
