Microsoft Fabric / Power BI Architect
Engagement Type: Consultant
Duration: 6 months
Location: Austin, TX preferred; open to remote candidates who can work within Austin core hours
Overview
We are seeking an experienced Microsoft Fabric / Power BI Architect to lead an assessment, optimization, and migration of an established Power BI environment to Microsoft Fabric.
This is a hands-on architecture and consulting engagement focused on improving capacity utilization, performance, cost efficiency, workspace architecture, monitoring, governance, and data ingestion.
The ideal consultant has previously worked with complex Power BI Premium/Embedded environments and can evaluate the current architecture, identify opportunities for improvement, design the future-state Fabric environment, and lead the migration through execution.
Key Responsibilities
Microsoft Fabric Migration & Capacity Optimization
- Assess current Power BI workloads and determine appropriate Microsoft Fabric F-SKU capacity sizing.
- Analyze utilization and identify opportunities to improve capacity performance and reduce unnecessary spend.
- Model total cost of ownership across Fabric capacity, Power BI licensing, and the existing environment.
- Design a capacity scaling strategy, including scheduled scale-down during lower-traffic periods.
- Develop and execute a migration strategy from the existing Power BI environment to Microsoft Fabric.
- Provide cost comparisons across current and future licensing/capacity models.
Capacity & Workspace Architecture
- Assess existing workspace-to-capacity assignments and identify performance, governance, and scalability gaps.
- Design a scalable workspace and capacity architecture supporting multiple departments and BI workloads.
- Establish capacity isolation strategies so resource-intensive workloads do not negatively impact other teams or reports.
- Balance workload isolation against infrastructure cost and operational complexity.
- Define workspace provisioning, publishing permissions, access controls, and development-to-production promotion processes.
- Recommend chargeback or cost-allocation models for shared BI infrastructure.
Monitoring, Performance & Alerting
- Establish performance baselines using Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics, Log Analytics, or comparable monitoring tools.
- Monitor CPU, memory, throttling, query performance, and overall capacity utilization.
- Design and implement proactive alerting that identifies capacity or performance degradation before it impacts dashboard users.
- Define alert thresholds, escalation procedures, and operational ownership.
- Transition monitoring and alerting capabilities to internal engineering teams with clear documentation.
Snowflake-to-Power BI Data Strategy
- Assess existing Snowflake-to-Power BI data flows and refresh patterns.
- Identify opportunities to reduce reliance on resource-intensive full dataset refreshes.
- Evaluate incremental refresh, DirectQuery, Microsoft Fabric Mirroring, and full refresh strategies based on individual workload requirements.
- Recommend the appropriate ingestion and refresh approach for each dataset based on data volatility, performance, and capacity cost.
- Develop an implementation roadmap outlining anticipated capacity and performance improvements.
Key Deliverables
- Fabric capacity sizing and cost model.
- Current-state assessment and future-state Fabric architecture.
- Workspace-to-capacity architecture and governance model.
- Capacity isolation and departmental cost-allocation recommendations.
- Deployed and documented monitoring and alerting framework.
- Dataset-level Snowflake ingestion and refresh strategy.
- Microsoft Fabric migration plan, implementation runbook, and rollback strategy.
- Knowledge transfer and operational handoff to internal engineering teams.
Required Qualifications
- Proven hands-on experience with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI Premium/Embedded capacity administration.
- Experience administering Power BI at scale, including oversight of multiple workspaces running across Power BI Embedded and/or Microsoft Fabric capacities.
- Demonstrated experience sizing, optimizing, and cost-modeling Microsoft Fabric F-SKUs.
- Experience migrating or modernizing enterprise Power BI environments using Microsoft Fabric.
- Strong understanding of Power BI Embedded, Premium, Pro, and Fabric licensing/capacity models.
- Experience designing multi-workspace or multi-tenant Power BI architectures with workload and capacity isolation.
- Hands-on experience with Fabric Capacity Metrics, Log Analytics, performance monitoring, and alerting.
- Experience integrating Snowflake with Power BI, including full refresh, incremental refresh, DirectQuery, and/or Fabric Mirroring.
- Ability to translate technical assessments into actionable architecture recommendations and execute against those recommendations.
- Strong documentation and communication skills with the ability to work across Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, and business BI teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience migrating organizations from Power BI Premium/Embedded or enterprise licensing models to Microsoft Fabric.
- Experience designing chargeback or cost-allocation models for shared analytics infrastructure.
- Experience with customer-facing embedded analytics.
- Previous consulting or architecture engagement experience where the individual owned assessment, recommendations, implementation, and knowledge transfer.
Engagement Expectations
This consultant will work closely with Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, and departmental BI stakeholders. Weekly progress reporting against defined deliverables is expected.
#TECHIND