Engineer - Contingent

Position: Engineer 5 - Contingent
Position:
Data & AI Engineer

Location:

Minneapolis, MN/ Chandler, AZ , Irving, TX and Charlotte, NC (Hybrid – 3 days onsite; 2 days remote) Duration: 18 months contract Job  Job Overview:
Seeking a Principal Microsoft Data & AI Engineer who combines advanced SQL and Microsoft Fabric expertise with hands-on data engineering, data wrangling, analytical modeling, and practical experience using generative AI tools to accelerate data analysis and solution development.

Position Summary:

Seeking a senior, hands-on data engineer to design and deliver trusted data products for workforce analytics, operational reporting, executive decision-making, and AI-assisted analysis. The role requires deep Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Fabric expertise, advanced data modeling skills to create reusable analytical models for hypothesis testing and analysis, strong data integration capabilities, practical experience using AI tools for data work, and advanced Excel proficiency.

This is a senior, hands-on engineering role. The candidate will be expected to take ownership of complex data problems from initial source assessment through ingestion, transformation, data quality validation, modeling, documentation, and delivery of analysis-ready data products. The ideal candidate can work effectively with both established enterprise data sources and less-structured, authorized inputs such as Excel workbooks, email-delivered files, exported reports, APIs, and approved web-based data sources.

The environment is primarily within the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft SQL Server is the core database platform, Microsoft Fabric is heavily used for data engineering and analytics, and Azure will support the team’s Operational Data Store. Power BI and Excel are key consumption tools. The team expects to gain access to Databricks in the first quarter of 2027, so prior Databricks or lakehouse experience is beneficial but not required.

A successful candidate must be comfortable building robust technical solutions while also understanding how analysts and senior executives consume information. Although this is an engineering position, advanced Excel proficiency is required because many executive deliverables and analytical workflows will continue to be consumed through Excel. Core platforms:
Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Fabric, Azure, Power BI, Excel

Experience:

7 plus years in data engineering or a closely related discipline. Future platform Databricks access expected in Q1 2027 Work style:
Senior individual contributor; hands-on delivery and technical leadership.

Primary Responsibilities:

Design, build, test, deploy, and support scalable data ingestion, transformation, and integration solutions using Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Fabric. Develop reusable ETL and ELT processes that move data from authorized enterprise systems into governed analytical data stores and semantic models. Write and optimize advanced SQL, including complex queries, stored procedures, views, transformations, and performance-tuned processing routines. Design relational, dimensional, semantic, and analytical data models that support Power BI, Excel, human analysis, and approved AI-assisted analysis.

Design enterprise data models using repository-driven standards and Medallion methodology to deliver governed, high-quality, analytics-ready data assets. Integrate structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from databases, Excel, CSV files, email-delivered files, APIs, exported reports, and authorized web-based sources. Create controlled, repeatable processes for nonstandard data sources with validation, reconciliation, traceability, and error handling. Profile data, identify quality issues, determine root causes, and implement remediation or…