Job Title: Data Architect / Backend Developer (PHP Laravel & MySQL for BI Systems) Location: London, although remote considered Job Type: Contract (5 months) Department: Data Engineering Reports To: Lead Developer About the Role We’re looking for a Data Architect / 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 help 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 Design and implement database architectures and ETL pipelines to support BI tools and data analysis platforms. Develop backend services and APIs in PHP Laravel to expose data for dashboards, reporting tools, and analytics consumers. Write advanced Eloquent/MySQL queries, stored procedures, and views to transform and aggregate data for analytical use. Collaborate with BI analysts and business stakeholders to understand data needs and ensure the backend infrastructure supports reporting requirements. Optimize data flows for performance and reliability, especially in high-volume and near real-time environments. Implement data validation, 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: 4 years of experience in backend development using PHP Laravel, ideally in data-intensive environments. Strong experience in MySQL development, including data modelling, performance tuning, and complex joins/aggregations. 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. Excellent problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and the ability to translate business needs into technical solutions. Preferred: Experience designing systems with Event Sourcing. 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.