Data Lead/Architect with Microsoft Fabric / Power BI / Synapse

Job Title: Data Lead/Architect with Microsoft Fabric / Power BI / Synapse  Location: Arlington, VA (Priority 1) and St. Louis, MO (Priority 2) - ONSITE Duration: Contract

Experience

• 12+ years in Data Architecture / Analytics Platforms / Cloud Data Engineering
• 4+ years in Microsoft analytics ecosystem (Fabric / Power BI / Synapse / Azure Data)
• Proven experience designing platforms for large enterprises (multi-team, multi-domain, 1k+ users)
• Experience implementing governance and security at scale

Key Responsibilities (Must-Have)

• Fabric Platform Design & Workspace Architecture:

Design scalable workspace and capacity strategy:

• Domain-aligned and environment-separated structure (dev/test/prod)
• Naming conventions, tagging/taxonomy, ownership model

Design OneLake organization:

• Folder conventions, zones (landing/curated/serving), lifecycle conventions
• Standards for Delta table structure, partitioning, retention, and schema evolution

Define item and data product blueprints:

• When to use Lakehouse vs Warehouse vs Real-time capabilities
• How to structure pipelines, notebooks, dataflows, and semantic models

Define and implement architecture patterns:

• Medallion architecture standards and curated modeling approach
• Dimensional modeling strategy for data marts
• Semantic model standards for reuse, performance, and governance

Security & identity Setup:

• Microsoft Entra ID group-based RBAC
• Least privilege patterns, separation of duties
• RLS/OLS patterns in semantic models

Design and Setup Governance, including but not limited to:

• Apply Fabric-native governance best practices:
• Workspace roles and permission bundles for personas
• Controlled sharing patterns to reduce data sprawl
• Standards for certification/endorsement process

Work with governance teams to ensure:

• Metadata capture conventions are consistently applied
• Data Lineage is captured
• Sensitivity labeling strategy is embedded in workflows

Build Frameworks around DevOps & Automation:

• CI/CD (Git workflows, release/promotion strategies)
• Scripting/automation mindset (PowerShell/Python preferred; REST APIs)
• Monitoring, Observability & Operational Readiness:

Design and implement monitoring for:

• Pipelines, notebooks, dataflows execution success and runtimes
• Warehouse/Lakehouse query performance and refresh health
• Semantic model refresh and usage trends
• Capacity utilization and throttling patterns
• Define alerting thresholds, incident classification, and runbooks
• Drive operational readiness gates before production cutovers

Cost Optimization:

• Implement design-time and run-time cost optimization:
• Scheduling and workload shaping to reduce peak contention
• Reuse strategies (shared curated layers, shared semantic models)
• Identify duplication and encourage governed reuse (OneLake alignment)

Provide capacity strategy inputs:

• Right-sizing, workload isolation guidance for critical workloads
• Cost allocation approach by workspace/domain where feasible

Enablement, Standards, and Collaboration with Delivery Teams

Define golden path patterns and accelerate delivery:

• Templates and standards for pipelines and lakehouse layout
• PR review checklists for Fabric engineering deliverables

Provide architecture oversight during implementation:

• Design reviews, technical governance checkpoints, risk mitigation

Coach teams on best practices:

• Performance, security, operational readiness, and governance adoption

Behavioral Competencies

• Strong architectural thinking with a platform engineering mindset
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication (technical + executive)
• Ability to define standards and drive adoption across teams
• Pragmatic approach balances governance with agility and self-service
• Strong documentation discipline (blueprints, playbooks, reference patterns)