PowerBI Contractor

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

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.

• 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.

• 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
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• Recommend chargeback or cost-allocation models for shared BI infrastructure.

• Establish performance baselines using Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics, Log Analytics, or comparable monitoring tools
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• 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.

• 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, Direct Query, 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.

• 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.