Teams hire a Drupal developer for one of three jobs: getting off a version that no longer gets security fixes, keeping a large site patched and fast, or planning the move to a headless stack. We place engineers who work on all three, on multilingual sites with big editorial teams. If you need the whole programme delivered instead, see our Drupal development services.
What does a Drupal developer do for an enterprise team?
The tasks we are hired for most often:
- Major version upgrades. Moving a Drupal 9 or 10 codebase to the current major, or a Drupal 7 site to a supported version through the Migrate API. The developer runs Upgrade Status and Drupal Rector, rewrites custom modules and replaces abandoned contrib modules.
- Module and theme audits. Sorting custom code from contrib, finding modules without a maintained release, and checking open security advisories against what is installed.
- Cache and performance work. Cache tags, contexts and max-age on custom render arrays, Views caching, and purge rules for Varnish or a CDN.
- Decoupled front ends. Exposing content through JSON:API, which ships in core, or GraphQL from contrib, and building the Next.js layer on top.
- Configuration and release pipeline. Config split per environment, Composer-managed patches, and a CI job that runs updates the same way every time.
- Editor tooling. Paragraphs or Layout Builder setups, content moderation workflows and role permissions that editors can live with.
What do we check before we send you a Drupal developer?
Drupal punishes people who know the admin UI but not the framework. We test for:
- Cache correctness: can the candidate explain why a block shows stale data and which cache metadata is missing.
- Entity access: custom queries that skip access checks leak unpublished content, and we ask how they avoid it.
- Update order: hook_update_N, post-update functions and config imports run in a sequence that breaks releases when it is wrong.
- Multilingual handling: translated entities, language fallbacks and URL aliases per language.
- Custom code hidden in the theme layer, which makes upgrades and front end replacement much harder.
- Composer discipline: patches tracked with a reason, no edits in vendor or core.
Candidates also review a real module and walk through a Drupal upgrade they shipped.
Should you upgrade, stay or leave Drupal?
We answer this in the first audit, not in a pitch. The usual pattern:
- Current major version, healthy modules, editors happy: stay, fix cache and deployment, and keep upgrading on schedule.
- Old major, mostly contrib modules, simple content model: upgrade in place through the Migrate API.
- Old major, heavy custom code, redesign already planned: decouple. Drupal stays as the content store while the front end is rebuilt.
- Editors blocked by release cycles, front end changes slowly: plan the exit to a headless CMS, with content moved by script.
When the answer is exit, a developer is rarely enough. Our Drupal migration services cover content mapping, redirects and cutover.
What happens in the first month?
The first week goes to reading: repository, staging, production logs, the module list and the upgrade checkers. By week two your tech lead gets a ranked risk report and the developer has merged one small fix, which proves the pipeline works. Weeks three and four go to the first planned piece, usually the highest-risk custom module rewritten for the target version or the cache layer corrected on your slowest pages.
How do you engage a Drupal developer?
Start with one dedicated developer if your team already has a lead and a backlog. Use IT staff augmentation to add several engineers under your management, or give a scoped upgrade to a dedicated team that owns delivery. Rates across roles and seniority run from $50 to $150 per hour, quoted after a call about the brief. You interview the developer before work starts. Other platforms are listed under hire headless CMS developers.
What have we done with Drupal?
A European enterprise healthtech organization came to us on Drupal 7 with a hard end-of-life deadline. We moved the content to Payload and rebuilt the front end in Next.js, cutting LCP from 4.3s to 1.5s and halving editor publish time. The details are in the Drupal to Next.js migration case study.
