Austin PHP Developer — SaaS, Startups, Custom Stacks
I am an Austin PHP developer building Laravel 13 + Livewire 4 applications for Austin SaaS startups, scale-ups, and custom-stack engagements. 25 years in computer science, U.S. Army veteran, single-principal delivery. Houston-anchored, Austin reachable by car within a few hours for kickoff meetings in Bee Cave, Round Rock, Cedar Park, South Congress, downtown, or the Capitol corridor.
Austin as a PHP / Laravel market
Austin is the Texas startup capital. The Austin buyer pool tilts toward SaaS founders, open-source-adjacent shops, B2B software companies, and the public-sector tech surface at the Capitol. The dominant stack vocabulary at the founder level is Ruby on Rails, Python / Django, Node.js, and Go — but the dominant stack vocabulary at the working-engineer level is whichever framework actually ships the application on time, and Laravel 13 ships fast.
Austin Laravel engagements are unusual in three ways. First, the founders are more technical than in most Texas metros, which means scoping conversations skip the "what is Laravel" tier and go straight to architecture tradeoffs. Second, the engagement length is shorter on average — Austin SaaS founders ship MVPs in 8-12 weeks, not 6-month enterprise builds. Third, the open-source-adjacent culture means Austin buyers care about contribution graphs and public-code track records more than Houston or Dallas buyers do. The GitHub commit graph carries more weight in Austin scoping conversations than it does elsewhere in Texas.
If you are an Austin founder or operator looking for a senior Laravel / PHP developer who will ship the MVP on time, this page is the right entry. The scoping call assumes you know what Laravel is.
Austin verticals I work in
- SaaS startups (pre-seed to Series B). MVP builds, post-MVP scale-up engineering, technical debt cleanup that a junior team produced under deadline.
- B2B SaaS scale-ups. Subscription billing, multi-tenancy, role/permission policy, Sanctum APIs, Fortify auth, internal admin surfaces.
- Open-source-adjacent shops. Builds where the buyer also intends to open-source part of the codebase; CI, docs, and contribution-friendly patterns matter.
- Public-sector adjacent. Texas Capitol corridor contractors, public-university adjacent vendors, civic tech projects.
Austin geography
Bee Cave and Lakeway (corporate campus territory, west Austin operators), Round Rock (Dell, Indeed, the Tech Ridge corridor), Cedar Park / Leander (residential tech-employee dense), South Congress and East Austin (startup density, downtown overflow), the Capitol corridor (public-sector adjacent), downtown Austin (Capital Factory, accelerator alumni density), Mueller (mixed-use, increasingly tech-heavy). Each sub-metro has its own commute and meeting-availability pattern; engagement shape adapts.
What I build for Austin SaaS
- MVPs that ship. Laravel 13 + Livewire 4 + Flux 2 + Tailwind 4 + Pest 4. Single principal, written specification, 8-12 week timeline, working code on every checkpoint.
- Post-MVP scale-up. Subscription billing (Cashier), multi-tenancy (single-database or multi-database), API surface, admin tooling, observability.
- Technical-debt cleanup. Codebases produced by junior teams under deadline. Pest test coverage, Pint style, performance, security review.
- Founder-friendly handover. The deployed application, the test suite, the README runbook, the deploy pipeline — all owned by the founder, not me.
Do you take pre-seed / seed-stage SaaS engagements?
Yes — that is one of the more common Austin engagement shapes. Pre-seed MVPs are typically 8-12 week fixed-scope builds; seed-stage post-MVP work is typically 12-24 weeks. The scoping call covers the funding posture so the engagement shape matches the runway.
Do you take equity in lieu of cash?
No — cash-only engagements. Equity-in-lieu compresses the principal-engineer accountability that the practice is built on. I will refer to engineer-founders interested in equity arrangements rather than take them myself.
Will you travel to Austin for kickoff?
Yes — Austin is reachable by car from Houston in under 3 hours. A 1-day kickoff workshop in Austin is part of several engagements. Day-to-day work is remote. Follow-up trips for sensitive engagements are negotiable.
What is your hourly rate?
Bespoke, scoped per engagement, written into SOW before contract. Austin MVP engagements are typically fixed-price; post-MVP work is typically hourly retainer.
Do you contribute to open source?
Yes — periodically, when consulting work surfaces an issue that belongs upstream. The contribution graph is public on GitHub (linked in the about page). I do not maintain my own open-source projects at scale; the practice is closed-source consulting work.
Scope This Engagement
Single principal, plan first, working code on every checkpoint.
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