Travel, Miles & Loyalty Platform (123 Milhas)
PHP Developer
Core back-end PHP engineering on 123 Milhas' high-traffic travel and miles platform; multi-programme loyalty wallet (HotMilhas), P2P miles marketplace with escrow, multi-gateway payment processing (PIX, Cielo, PagSeguro), and a PHP 5.X 8.1 production platform modernisation.
Completed May 2021
Key Impact
- ✓ PHP 5.x → 8.1 migration with zero downtime
- ✓ P95 API latency reduced 40% via index & query rewrites
- ✓ Multi-gateway payment layer unifying PIX, Cielo, PagSeguro
Core back-end PHP engineering on 123 Milhas and HotMilhas — Brazil’s largest travel and miles platform.
Backend & Modernisation (PHP 5.X → 8.1):
• PHP — Upgraded the full production platform from 5.X to 8.1; PSR, and modern syntax enforced across all modules.
• SQL Server — Schema normalisation, composite indexes, and stored procedure rewrites to hit P95 latency targets on APIs.
• MVC Architecture — Monolith decomposed into bounded service modules (loyalty, payments) with clear interfaces.
Miles & Loyalty Wallet (HotMilhas):
• Multi-programme wallet — LATAM Pass, Smiles/GOL, and TudoAzul balances aggregated with real-time mile valuations.
• P2P miles marketplace — Real-time quotation engine;
• Bank loyalty bridge — OAuth integrations covering Livelo, Esfera, Itaucard, and Superdigital with async polling and retry logic.
Payments & Transactions:
• Multi-gateway payment layer — Cielo, PagSeguro, PIX, and boleto bancário unified behind a single interface.
• Automated payout engine — PIX and bank-transfer disbursements triggered on airline-confirmed transfers.
• Fraud prevention — Velocity checks, device-fingerprint scoring, and rule-based validation at the service boundary.
REST API:
• Versioned endpoints — Loyalty, miles, and financial reporting APIs with token auth, rate limiting, and idempotency keys.
• OpenAPI documentation — Formal spec with sequence diagrams as the integration contract for internal teams and partners.
Executive Pricing Dashboard:
• Planning & architecture — Designed a real-time monitoring dashboard tracking live prices on Loyalty and R$Real conversion rate.
• Data ingestion — Scheduled live database polling feeding a normalised price store, refreshed on configurable intervals.
• Decision-making layer — Aggregated price trends and competitor deltas surfaced as charts and alerts for C-level and commercial executives.
Infrastructure:
• Load balancer — Health-check routing for zero-downtime deployments under peak traffic.
• Cron pipeline — Scheduled jobs for reconciliation, airline API polling, and financial batch exports.
Technologies Used
Case Study
Problem
123 Milhas needed to migrate a PHP 5.x monolith to 8.1 while handling millions of BRL in live transactions without downtime.
Context
Brazil's largest travel and miles platform — peak traffic during airline sales, complex loyalty wallet integrations, and a fragile legacy codebase.
Constraints
Zero-downtime requirement, live payment SLAs, no existing unit tests, and aggressive timelines driven by PHP 5.x EOL.
Architecture Decision
Incremental strangler-fig migration: bounded service modules extracted one at a time (loyalty, payments, marketplace), each covered with tests before go-live.
Tradeoffs
Chose incremental extraction over a full rewrite, accepting short-term dual-stack complexity to keep revenue flowing throughout migration.
Outcome
Full production migration to PHP 8.1 complete; payment layer handling millions monthly with improved fraud detection and zero regression incidents.
Implementation Highlights
- → Wrote migration tooling to shim PHP 5 global functions and deprecated APIs
- → Normalised SQL Server schema and rewrote stored procedures — P95 latency dropped 40%
- → Unified Cielo, PagSeguro, PIX, and boleto behind a single payment interface