Hi, I'm Emanuel Aguirre, a PHP and Laravel developer based in Spain. For over a decade I've helped education companies ship dependable platforms, scale them as user demand grows, and keep them calm through every release.
Most of my career has lived inside education platforms: places where uptime is non-negotiable, students rely on a working live class, and a slow page is a missed lesson.
I work end-to-end on the platforms I join: Laravel backends, third-party integrations, database design, code review, release pipelines, and the occasional production incident. I'm usually the technical voice in the room when business is weighing a new effort, translating intent into concrete solution paths and naming the trade-offs before scope locks in.
I've led small distributed teams through agile workflows, mentored juniors, and walked teammates through the blockers and ambiguous calls that always live around the edges of a feature, partnering across product, QA, DevOps, research, and marketing to turn fuzzy requirements into safe, observable releases.
PHP Developer (Contract) · Education platform, US client
Technical Lead, PHP Web Developer
Full-Stack Web Developer
900 ms → 250 ms
Profiled production hot paths with Blackfire, optimized the slowest queries, and added strategic caching during the Laravel migration, bringing the home dashboard from 900 ms down to 250 ms without changing the UX.
PayPal → Stripe + PayPal
Added Stripe as the primary payment option alongside PayPal at an online Spanish-language school, together with transactional email through Mandrill and the move of live classes from Adobe Connect to Zoom.
In-house framework → Laravel
Led the migration of OpenEnglish Junior off a hand-rolled PHP framework onto Laravel without disrupting live classes, using the move to rebuild scalability, maintainability, and developer velocity.
Open to contract and full-time backend roles, especially around education, performance, and platform reliability. Best reached by email.