Backend Developer (PHP/Laravel & SQL for BI Systems)

TN United Kingdom; London; Remote; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company is seeking a Backend Developer with strong PHP (Laravel) and MySQL experience to enhance their data infrastructure. The role involves developing backend services, optimizing data flows, and ensuring data quality for business intelligence platforms.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in backend development using PHP Laravel.
• Strong experience in MySQL development, including data modelling.

Responsibilities

• Develop backend services and APIs in PHP to expose data for dashboards.
• Optimize data flows for performance and reliability.

Skills

PHP

MySQL

Problem Solving

Tools

Power BI

Tableau

AWS RDS

Azure SQL

Google BigQuery

Job description

Location: Remote or Offices in London & Chicago
Job Type: Contract ( approx. 5 months)
Department: Data Engineering

Reports To: Lead Developer

About the Role

We’re looking for a Backend Developer with strong experience in PHP (Laravel) and MySQL to help build and optimize the data infrastructure behind our business intelligence and analytics platforms . You will be responsible for working with our Lead Developer to design scalable data models, developing backend services that feed BI tools, and ensuring data is clean, consistent, and readily available for reporting and analysis.

This role bridges backend development and data engineering—ideal for someone who thrives on enabling data-driven decision-making and enjoys solving complex data problems.

Responsibilities

• Develop backend services and APIs in PHP ( Laravel ) to expose data for dashboards, reporting tools, and analytics consumers.
• Write advanced Eloquent/MySQL queries and views to transform and aggregate data for analytical use.
• Optimize data flows for performance and reliability, especially in high-volume and near real-time environments.
• Implement data validation, testing, monitoring, and logging mechanisms to ensure data quality and traceability.
• Work with front-end teams to integrate backend endpoints into visualizations and reporting interfaces (e.g., Power BI, Tableau, custom dashboards).
• Maintain documentation for data schemas, ETL processes, and backend services to support ongoing development and data governance.

Qualifications

Required:

• 8+ years of experience in backend development using PHP Laravel , ideally in data-intensive environments.
• Strong understanding of best practices including SOLID principles and writing code to a high standard (eg. Larastan Level 10).
• Strong understanding of how to write good quality tests.
• Strong experience in MySQL development, including data modelling, performance tuning, and complex joins/aggregations.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and the ability to translate business needs into technical solutions.

Preferred:

• Familiarity with BI tools such as Power BI , Tableau , QuickSight , Looker/Data Studio or similar.
• Understanding of ETL best practices and experience working with structured and semi-structured data sources.
• Experience working with data warehousing and reporting use cases.
• Exposure to cloud data infrastructure (e.g., AWS RDS , Azure SQL , Fabric, Synapse, Google BigQuery ).
• Familiarity with data versioning, data lakes, or columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet , ORC ).
• Experience integrating BI tools with backend APIs or embedding dashboards into web applications.
• Knowledge of data governance, access control, and data privacy standards.