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Top 20 Symfony Developers Leading the Industry

symfony developers - Top 20 Symfony Developers Leading the Industry

Symfony has evolved into one of the most powerful PHP frameworks, thanks to a vibrant community of exceptional developers around the world.

From open-source contributors and core team maintainers to the minds behind tools like PHPUnit, Doctrine, and API Platform – these individuals have shaped not just Symfony, but modern PHP itself. This list highlights some of the most influential and currently active figures in the Symfony ecosystem, including creators of essential libraries, performance pioneers, and educators who’ve brought Symfony to developers everywhere.

  1. Bernhard Schussek
  2. Robin Chalas
  3. Kévin Dunglas
  4. Javier Eguiluz
  5. Tobias Nyholm
  6. Ryan Weaver
  7. Christophe Coevoet
  8. Grégoire Pineau
  9. Alexander M. Turek
  10. Derick Rethans
  11. Larry Garfield
  12. Wouter De Jong
  13. Matthias Noback
  14. Guilherme Blanco
  15. Paweł Jędrzejewski
  16. Tomas Votruba
  17. Marco Pivetta
  18. Sebastian Bergmann
  19. Benjamin Eberlei
  20. Sara Golemon

Now, let’s delve deeper into their qualifications and achievements:

Bernhard Schussek

YouTube Video

Nationality: German

Bernhard is widely known for his work on the Symfony Form component and the PHP community at large.

A former Symfony core developer, he designed much of the form handling infrastructure that developers use daily. He also created numerous PHP libraries (like Webmozart Assert) focusing on clean code and architecture. Bernhard’s philosophy of simple solutions for complex problems shines through his talks and blog posts. Though he’s moved on from day-to-day Symfony core work, he continues to influence best practices through his company Webmozarts and open-source contributions.

Robin Chalas

Nationality: French

Robin is a young Symfony core team member who has quickly made a name as a security expert in the framework.

As maintainer of the Lexik JWT Authentication bundle and other OSS packages, he strengthens Symfony’s authentication and authorization ecosystem. Robin contributes fixes for security issues and adds new features to the core Security component, ensuring Symfony remains safe and modern. He’s also active in the community on StackOverflow and conference talks, freely sharing knowledge. Based in Lyon, when not coding he’s known to enjoy good street food – but most of the time, Robin is busy keeping our apps secure.

Kévin Dunglas

Kevin Dunglas - Top 20 Symfony Developers Leading the Industry

Nationality: French

Kévin is the creator of API Platform, a popular open-source framework built on Symfony for building REST and GraphQL APIs.

As founder of Les-Tilleuls.coop, a French tech cooperative, he actively codes and architects projects in the Symfony ecosystem. Kévin has also introduced innovations like Mercure (real-time update protocol) and Vulcain (HTTP/2 server push), and contributed to Symfony core components. His work as an author, speaker, and open-source maintainer has made modern API development in PHP far more accessible.

Javier Eguiluz

Nationality: Spanish

Javier is a longtime Symfony core team member and was instrumental in Symfony’s documentation and developer experience.

Employed by Symfony’s parent company, he has been one of the funded maintainers of the project. Javier created EasyAdmin, the go-to Symfony bundle for admin dashboards, showcasing his focus on developer-friendly tools. He also led the Symfony Docs team, contributing an astonishing 19,000+ documentation commits over the years. His community outreach (blogging, speaking) and continuous code contributions have made Symfony more approachable for all.

Tobias Nyholm

Nationality: Swedish

Tobias is a Symfony core team member and a driving force behind many PHP libraries and community initiatives.

He co-founded the PHP HTTP initiative (HTTPlug) to standardize HTTP clients, and has created tools like Mailer, PHP-Cache, and Flysystem integrations used in Symfony projects. Tobias organizes Swedish PHP meetups, co-hosted the Sound of Symfony podcast, and regularly speaks at conferences. A Symfony Certified Developer, he also runs his company Happyr, mentoring others. Tobias’s passion for clean architecture and knowledge-sharing has made a lasting impact on both Symfony and the broader PHP ecosystem.

Ryan Weaver

Ryan Weaver - Top 20 Symfony Developers Leading the Industry

Nationality: American

Ryan is known as the friendly face and voice of Symfony learning.

He leads Symfony’s documentation efforts and is a member of the core team. Ryan co-founded KnpUniversity (now SymfonyCasts), where he authors video tutorials that have onboarded countless developers to Symfony. As an official Symfony evangelist and trainer, he continually refines docs and best practices. Despite health challenges, Ryan remains an active contributor and community leader, exemplifying passion and resilience in the Symfony ecosystem.

Christophe Coevoet

Nationality: French

Christophe (a.k.a. “Stof”) was one of the earliest Symfony contributors and helped shape the framework’s architecture.

A Symfony core team member for years, he also contributed significantly to Doctrine and other PHP projects. Christophe’s expertise in dependency injection and bundle systems made him a go-to authority in the community. He represented Symfony at international open-source initiatives like the EU-FOSSA hackathons. Now based in the UK, he continues to advise and contribute to Symfony and related libraries, leveraging his deep institutional knowledge of PHP.

Gregoire Pineau

Nationality: French

Grégoire is a Symfony core dev recognized for tackling challenging issues and engaging the community.

He has contributed major features like the Workflow component, the Lock component, and improvements to Symfony’s Console and Form themes. A former developer at Blackfire.io, Grégoire brought real-world performance and profiling insight into Symfony’s development. He’s known for the lengthy discussions on his pull requests, a testament to how he involves others in refining solutions. Grégoire’s blend of technical skill and community engagement make him a highly respected figure in the Symfony world.

Alexander M. Turek

Alexander M. Turek - Top 20 Symfony Developers Leading the Industry

Nationality: German

Alexander is a respected member of both the Symfony and Doctrine core teams.

With 20+ years of PHP experience, he specializes in modernizing legacy applications and improving code quality. Alexander has contributed to Symfony’s DependencyInjection and Console components and is a key maintainer ensuring compatibility between Symfony and Doctrine. By day he works as a staff engineer in Germany, and by night he’s reviewing PRs or sharing insights on continuous integration and strict typing in PHP. His dedication to “code aged like a good whisky” (as he jokingly puts it) reflects in the stability and elegance he brings to projects.

Derick Rethans

Nationality: Dutch

Derick is the creator of Xdebug, the indispensable debugging and profiling extension for PHP. A PHP internals expert and long-time core contributor, he also developed the DateTime extension and various other PHP improvements.

Derick’s work on Xdebug (now over 20 years old) has provided developers the tools to step-debug Symfony applications and analyze performance bottlenecks in detail. Based in London, he now works as a contractor and is part of the PHP Foundation, ensuring the language’s future. Derick is also known for his speaking and writing – demystifying complex topics like opcode internals. His relentless focus on tooling and internals has empowered Symfony developers to build better software with confidence.

Larry Garfield

Nationality: American

Larry has been a bridge between the Drupal world and the wider PHP community, including Symfony. He spent over a decade leading Drupal development and championed the adoption of Symfony components in Drupal 8.

Larry is a member of the PHP-FIG Core Committee since 2017, helping craft PHP standards (PSRs) that ensure interoperability. An avid proponent of functional programming, he authored “Thinking Functionally in PHP.” Larry currently works as a Staff Engineer at LegalZoom, but remains a community voice through blogs and talks. He emphasizes clean code and forward-looking architecture, pushing Symfony and PHP toward a more robust, modern ecosystem. He also served a stint as Symfony’s diversity initiative lead, reflecting his dedication to a healthy community.

Wouter De Jong

Wouter De Jong - Top 20 Symfony Developers Leading the Industry

Nationality: Dutch

Wouter is a Symfony core and documentation team member who has helped countless developers through his writing and code contributions.

By day, he’s a software engineer at a car-sharing platform in the Netherlands, and by night, he’s merging Symfony pull requests and writing docs. Wouter has been particularly active in Symfony’s Messenger component and Console autocompletion features. He also experiments with integrating non-Symfony tools (like Eloquent ORM) into Symfony just for fun. As an all-around Symfony enthusiast with a passion for teaching, Wouter’s impact is felt both in the framework’s code and its learning materials.

Matthias Noback

Nationality: Dutch

Matthias is a prominent author, trainer, and blogger in the Symfony and PHP community. He wrote “A Year With Symfony”, one of the first books to deeply explore Symfony best practices, as well as “Principles of Package Design” and “Object Design Style Guide.”

Since 2011, Matthias has been blogging about all aspects of PHP architecture and testing, often using Symfony as the reference point. He is a regular conference speaker and conducts workshops on topics like DDD, package design, and building testable applications. Through his company Noback’s Office, he consults and trains teams to write clean, maintainable Symfony code. Matthias’s thoughtful insights and clear writing have influenced a generation of Symfony developers.

Guilherme Blanco

Nationality: Brazilian

Guilherme is a core developer of the Doctrine project and was a key figure in the transition from Doctrine 1 to Doctrine 2 (the ORM that Symfony uses).

He contributed heavily to Doctrine’s architecture and also to PHP itself (he proposed early PHP annotations ideas) and Zend Framework. Guilherme worked at Facebook on their HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) for PHP, bringing his expertise in performance to one of the world’s largest PHP codebases. Now with over 20 years in development, he continues to lead engineering teams (recently in Canada) while staying active in open source. His contributions across Symfony, Doctrine, and PHP internals have made him an unsung hero enabling enterprise-grade PHP applications.

Pawel Jedrzejewski

Pawel Jedrzejewski - Top 20 Symfony Developers Leading the Industry

Nationality: Polish

Paweł is the founder and project leader of Sylius, the open-source e-commerce platform built on Symfony components.

A self-taught developer-turned-entrepreneur, he started Sylius in high school and grew it into a thriving ecosystem. Sylius (now with 1,000+ contributors) leverages Symfony, Doctrine, and Twig to deliver a modern e-commerce framework. Paweł’s work proved that Symfony’s solid foundation can scale to complex domains. He’s a frequent conference speaker and strong advocate for open-source in business. Under his guidance, Sylius has put Poland on the map in the Symfony world and made robust online stores easier to build.

Tomas Votruba

Nationality: Czech

Tomas is an open-source innovator known for bridging the gap between legacy and modern code.

He created Rector, a CLI tool (built on Symfony components) that automatically upgrades and refactors PHP code. Tomas has also authored the Symplify set of packages, which provide additional utilities on top of Symfony, and contributed to Doctrine and PHPStan. A blogger and speaker, he freely shares practical tips on maintaining large Symfony applications. Through his consulting, Tomas helps companies modernize their PHP codebases – encapsulating his motto: “change fast and safely” with automated tools.

Marco Pivetta

Nationality: Italian

Marco is a leading figure in the PHP enterprise realm and a former Doctrine ORM lead.

He co-authored Doctrine 2, bringing modern ORM patterns to PHP. Marco also created ProxyManager, a library for runtime code generation, which Symfony uses under the hood for lazy services. He has contributed to Zend Framework (Laminas) and many PSRs, advocating for better coding standards. As a consultant at Roave, now based in Germany, Marco helps teams write clean, performant PHP. His no-nonsense approach to software quality and “no sleep until it’s done” work ethic are almost legendary.

Sebastian Bergmann

Sebastian Bergmann - Top 20 Symfony Developers Leading the Industry

Nationality: German

Sebastian is the creator of PHPUnit, the standard testing framework that revolutionized PHP quality assurance.

By introducing xUnit-style testing to PHP early on, he played a vital role in professionalizing PHP development. Sebastian co-founded The PHP Consulting Company (thePHP.cc) and has coached countless teams on testing and software engineering. He’s authored books and regularly speaks about clean code and architecture. In the Symfony universe, PHPUnit is indispensable – and it’s Sebastian’s relentless improvement of this tool that enables the robust test coverage seen in Symfony and its bundles. After two decades, he remains active in open source, recently exploring new testing approaches and championing better coding practices.

Benjamin Eberlei

Nationality: German

Benjamin has been a driving force in PHP performance and architecture. He was the project lead of Doctrine ORM for many years, steering development of its second generation.

He also created Tideways, a popular performance monitoring and profiling tool for PHP applications. As a core contributor to Doctrine and occasional contributor to PHP itself, Benjamin has deep insight into writing efficient, clean code. He frequently shares his knowledge on ORMs, CQRS, and scaling Symfony apps (through blog posts and talks). Now the CEO of Tideways, he continues to support the community via open-source (e.g. Doctrine Migrations) and by hosting the Undercover ElePHPant podcast. His work helps Symfony developers write code that is both robust and fast.

Sara Golemon

Nationality: American

Sara is a veteran PHP core contributor whose work has had enormous impact on the PHP runtime. She is the author of “Extending and Embedding PHP” and contributed to PHP’s core engine for decades.

Sara worked at Facebook on the Hack/HHVM project, helping shape features that later influenced PHP 7’s performance improvements. She has implemented extensions ranging from MongoDB drivers to the Libsass PHP binding, and is a regular speaker on advanced topics. In 2021, Sara joined the PHP Foundation as a full-time core developer, ensuring PHP’s continued evolution. Symfony developers indirectly benefit greatly from her contributions – the faster, more stable PHP versions powering their apps owe much to Sara’s expertise and dedication to the language.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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