South helps growing companies find, hire, and pay top Latin American talent. Build high-performing teams in 21 days or less.
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A PHP Developer builds web applications and APIs using PHP, typically with Laravel, Symfony, or WordPress. They handle server-side business logic, database access, integrations, and the operational side of running PHP services. Despite the noise, PHP runs more of the web than any other language and is the default for e-commerce and CMS work.
Hiring a PHP Developer in the U.S. is significantly more expensive than in Latin America, with an average U.S. salary of $8,500 per month compared with an average Latin American salary of $3,000 per month, creating potential savings of up to 65%. Working with South gives you access to a vetted pool of LatAm PHP Developers on contracts that handle compliance and payroll, with same-time-zone collaboration.
Yes. PHP shops have run remotely for two decades. Latin America has deep PHP talent from agencies and product companies, particularly senior Laravel and WordPress developers. South contracts locally and keeps them in your time zone for tight collaboration.
Strong PHP fundamentals (8.x features), comfort with at least one major framework (Laravel or Symfony), MySQL or PostgreSQL fluency, plus a working knowledge of Composer, PHPUnit, and modern deploy practices. Senior signal is the ability to refactor a legacy PHP codebase into something maintainable rather than rewriting it.
PHP 8.x, Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, Composer, PHPUnit, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Nginx, Apache, plus tools like Laravel Forge, Envoyer, or Ploi for deploys. Xdebug for debugging, Tinker for live exploration.
A PHP Developer is a backend generalist using PHP. A Laravel Developer specializes in one framework. A WordPress Developer typically focuses on the CMS. A Magento Developer specializes in the e-commerce platform built on PHP.
South vets LatAm PHP engineers with technical interviews, take-home tasks in Laravel or Symfony, and reviews of past production work. You see a shortlist in seven to ten days, run your own interviews, and onboard in two to three weeks. Schedule a free call here to get started!
The region has the perfect mix of everything you want in remote employees: English skills, shared time zones, hard-working, and depth of talent. They are already accustomed to working remotely for top US startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Absolutely! The US and Latin America have basically the same time zones. No Latin American city is more than two hours ahead of EST.
Every hire is sourced based on your exact needs. They will arrive ready to support your business right away. They can do basically any tasks done remotely, but we recommend starting them as support so your team has more bandwidth for high-value strategic tasks.
All types of roles - customer service, executive assistant, sales, accounting, email marketing, lead generation, content writers, operations, social media marketing, and more!
You can pay directly through us (most popular) or we can connect you with one of our payroll partners.
You don't have to deal with any American labor laws / taxes when hiring full-time remote contractors. They aren't US-based, so no visas or sponsorships to deal with either.
We recommend market pay which varies for each role. See our salary guide and success stories for some ideas.
Then, we have two different models:
Staffing (most popular) - We charge a small monthly fee for each employee's monthly salary to make the process hassle-free. The fee covers sourcing, recruiting, admin, payroll, compliance, ongoing support, and a free replacement if necessary at any point. There are no cancellation fees or minimum commitments. You only pay if you make a hire.
Headhunting - A one-time simple fee once we've found the perfect candidate. This comes with a 120-day replacement guarantee.
For both options, you only pay something if we find you someone great that you want to hire.
Yes, we only recruit for full-time and we strongly recommend full-time hiring if you can. Stability (full-time & long-term) is highly sought after abroad. The top caliber candidates are only looking for full-time work.
You're also going to spend time training and getting them up to speed on your processes. It would be a waste to do that over and over again with new people all the time.
We recommend training new hires on one thing at a time.
For example, once they get up to speed on lead generation, you can add the next role writing blog posts or whatever you'd like. You can definitely overlap roles until you have enough work for multiple people.
The cost of living is much less in Latin American countries. Many of our employees are able to own homes, raise families, provide for their parents, and have in-home help of their own with their salaries.
If you aren't happy with your hire in the first 120 days, we will work with you to conduct a second round of search for the same role for free.
Just email us at Hello@HireInSouth.com and we will get back to you with an answer as soon as possible.
