Microsoft Fabric Architect – AR

Job description Purpose of the job

The Microsoft Fabric Architect will provide strategic and technical leadership for the council’s enterprise data and analytics platform. The role will review, validate and enhance the council’s Microsoft Fabric architecture, governance framework and operating model.

Working closely with the Data and Platforms Team, the postholder will ensure the platform remains scalable, secure, supportable and cost-effective, and that it aligns with Microsoft best practice and the council’s wider technology and digital ambitions.

This is a senior architecture and governance role requiring a holistic view across platform architecture, data design, security, governance, service operation and organisational adoption. It is not primarily a data engineering or report development position.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the review, optimisation and technical assurance of the council’s Microsoft Fabric architecture, including new solutions, significant changes and alignment with Microsoft and enterprise architecture best practice.
• Define and validate architecture patterns for One Lake, Lake houses, Warehouses, notebooks, data pipelines, dataflows, semantic models, Power BI and supporting Azure services.
• Review and strengthen the council’s Bronze, Silver and Gold Medallion architecture, ensuring that transformations, reusable data products and reporting layers are consistent, scalable and supportable.
• Review and strengthen Fabric and supporting Azure governance standards, including resource groups, subscriptions, ownership, tagging, RBAC, monitoring, cost management, workspace creation, lifecycle management and environment separation.
• Identify and control any Azure resources deployed within Fabric-related resource groups, ensuring they are documented, justified, supportable and subject to appropriate architecture, security and governance review.
• Define architectural guardrails for appropriate self-service analytics and service-led development, while avoiding duplication, uncontrolled platform growth or weakening of enterprise governance.
• Advise on where Microsoft Fabric should be used, including enterprise reporting, recurring reporting, cross-service analysis and data matching, and where operational requirements are better met through line-of-business systems.
• Review security boundaries, workspace permissions, sensitivity controls, sharing arrangements, access models, user accounts, service accounts, service principals, managed identities, workspace identity, Key Vault and governed connections.
• Ensure architecture and governance approaches support UK GDPR, information governance, data minimisation, DPIA and data-sharing requirements, and wider public sector obligations.
• Review and enhance integration with Microsoft Purview, including data catalogue, metadata, lineage, data ownership, classification and discoverability.
• Review capacity utilisation, performance and consumption patterns, and recommend approaches for capacity monitoring, workload protection, cost optimisation, showback and chargeback.
• Support the council’s approach to Fabric domains, work spaces, data products, semantic model ownership and business accountability.
• Define appropriate Dev, Test and Production practices, including source control, deployment pipelines, release management, testing, documentation and operational handover.
• Provide architectural input for AI, Copilot and advanced analytics use cases that depend on governed and trusted council data.
• Produce clear architecture diagrams, decision records, standards, roadmaps, options papers and recommendations for technical and senior stakeholder audiences.
• Work effectively with technical teams, data owners, information governance, cyber security,…