Azure Data Lead/Fabric Data Lead

Position: Azure Data Lead/Fabric Data Lead

Experience: 10+ Years

Employment Type: Contract (3+ months)

Shift: UK Shift (8 hours)
Work Mode: Remote

Must Have

Microsoft Fabric (OneLake, Lakehouse, Warehouse)

Azure Synapse Analytics

Azure Data Factory

Azure Data Lake Gen2

Delta Lake / Medallion Architecture

Power BI (Semantic layer, DAX)

Databricks

SQL & T-SQL

PySpark / Python

Data Modelling (Star/Snowflake)

CI/CD & DevOps for Data (Git, Pipelines)

8+ years data engineering / 3+ as lead

Technical leadership & stakeholder management

Nice to Have

Azure Purview / Microsoft Purview

Unity Catalog

Terraform / Bicep (IaC)

Real-time streaming (Event Hub, Stream Analytics)

dbt (data build tool)

OpenAI / Azure AI integration

GDPR / data privacy frameworks

Certifications

DP-700 (Fabric Analytics Engineer) Required

DP-203 (Azure Data Engineer) Required

AZ-900 / AZ-305 — Preferred

PL-300 (Power BI) — Preferred

Architecture, Design & Implementation

• Proven experience architecting end-to-end data platforms on Azure, from ingestion through to consumption
• Expertise in Lakehouse patterns — Bronze/Silver/Gold medallion, schema evolution, and data quality frameworks
• Hands-on design of scalable semantic models and BI solutions in Power BI / Fabric
• Strong understanding of data governance, lineage, cataloguing, and RBAC in Azure environments
• Ability to define and enforce architectural standards, best practices, and reusable design patterns
• Track record of leading architecture reviews, technical discovery sessions, and solution design workshops
• Experience with performance tuning — distributed compute, query optimisation, and partitioning strategies
• Comfortable navigating cost optimisation trade-offs at enterprise cloud scale