Fabric Data Architect

EU Remote - with on-site travel to France, Netherlands

Must be an EU Citizen / have authorization to work in the EU and travel on-site occasionally

6-12 month contract

Rate: Negotiable

Industry: Fintech / Financial Services / Insurance

Own the end-to-end target-state architecture for the Fabric data platform and act as the client-facing technical authority. Translate business and domain priorities into a coherent, secure, and scalable Fabric design, and govern architectural decisions .

Key responsibilities

• Target architecture: Define and own the Fabric target-state architecture — OneLake, medallion (Bronze/Silver/Gold), Lakehouse vs. Warehouse choices, workspace and capacity topology.
• Migration strategy: Determine per-warehouse treatment (lift-and-shift vs. domain-led redesign) and sequence waves using value-versus-complexity prioritisation.
• Client engagement: Act as primary architecture contact for client stakeholders; run design authority forums and secure architectural sign-off.
• Standards & governance: Establish architecture principles, reference patterns, naming and modelling standards, and enforce them across PODs.
• Security & compliance: Design RBAC via Entra ID, RLS/CLS/OLS, sensitivity labelling and geo-residency compliance with Purview integration.
• Performance & cost: Define capacity sizing, V-Order/file-size optimisation, Direct Lake strategy and FinOps guardrails.
• Risk & escalation: Identify architectural risks early, define mitigations, and resolve cross-POD technical conflicts.

Technical & functional skills

• Deep Microsoft Fabric expertise — OneLake, Lakehouse, Warehouse, Data Factory, Spark notebooks, Direct Lake, shortcuts, mirroring
• Strong data warehousing and lakehouse architecture; medallion design, 3NF and dimensional modelling
• Azure ecosystem — ADLS Gen2, Azure SQL, Synapse, Event Hub, Key Vault, networking and private endpoints
• Microsoft Purview governance, lineage, classification; MDM concepts and golden-record alignment
• Migration of legacy platforms (Oracle, SQL Server, SAP BW, Informatica/ADF/ODI) to cloud
• Performance tuning, capacity planning and cost optimisation on Fabric
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management and design-authority facilitation

Qualifications & experience

• 5-10+ years in data engineering/architecture with 2+ years on Microsoft Azure Fabric data platforms
• Proven ownership of at least one large-scale warehouse modernization or Lakehouse implementation in MS Fabric.
• Microsoft certifications preferred — DP-700 (Fabric Analytics Engineer)