Microsoft Fabric & Power BI Engineer — Philadelphia, PA

Position Summary

The Microsoft Fabric & Power BI Engineer is a hands-on individual contributor responsible for developing, deploying, securing, monitoring, and supporting production Power BI semantic models within the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem. This role supports the entire Analytics team and is assigned to strategic and operational projects that require semantic model engineering, source control, deployment, refresh reliability, performance management, and security.

The engineer partners with BI developers, analysts, dedicated Data Engineers, and IT to establish scalable development practices and maintain dependable production analytics. The role may create limited internal reports that provide insight into Fabric capacity, refresh activity, performance, usage, or platform health, but it is not primarily responsible for end-user report development.

Key Responsibilities

Semantic Model Development and Performance

• Design, develop, test, deploy, and maintain production Power BI semantic models that support enterprise analytics and reporting.

• Implement and support incremental refresh, partitioning, and refresh strategies for large semantic models.

• Use XMLA endpoints and Tabular Editor to manage model metadata, partitions, deployment activities, and advanced semantic model capabilities.

• Monitor and troubleshoot semantic model performance, refresh duration, resource utilization, and data quality issues using tools such as Performance Analyzer and Fabric capacity monitoring.

• Query Snowflake and Fabric SQL endpoints to validate source data, reconcile model results, investigate discrepancies, and confirm production readiness.

• Maintain clear model metadata, business-friendly field descriptions, technical documentation, and support materials.

• Apply sound dimensional modeling and semantic layer design practices in partnership with BI developers and Data Engineers.

Source Control, Deployment, and Release Management

• Manage Power BI and Fabric development artifacts through Git-based source control, including PBIP projects, branching, pull requests, code reviews, versioning, and release coordination.

• Promote semantic models and related artifacts through Development, Test/UAT, and Production environments.

• Configure and support Power BI/Fabric deployment pipelines and validate deployment rules, parameter changes, connections, security, and refresh behavior by environment.

• Contribute to repeatable release processes, rollback plans, deployment checklists, and production validation procedures.

• Provide occasional off-hours support for planned production releases and release-related issue resolution.

Refresh Operations and Production Support

• Configure and maintain refresh schedules, incremental refresh policies, partitions, connections, and related operational dependencies.

• Serve as a primary technical resource for diagnosing and resolving failed refreshes, model availability issues, performance degradation, and production data discrepancies.

• Monitor refresh completion, duration, reliability, gateway dependencies, and service-level expectations.

• Coordinate with Data Engineers on upstream data availability or transformation issues and with IT on gateway, credential, tenant-setting, or infrastructure concerns.

• Develop practical monitoring, alerting, and operational reporting for the Fabric and Power BI environment.

Security and Platform Support

• Design, implement, test, document, and maintain row-level security and semantic model security roles within Fabric and Power BI.

• Support workspace configuration, application access patterns, semantic model permissions, and deployment-related security within the Analytics team's area of responsibility.

• Understand Microsoft Fabric and Power BI tenant settings well enough to identify settings that control required features or behaviors.

• Partner with IT to request, validate, and troubleshoot Entra ID, Azure, gateway, service account, tenant, and other centrally administered changes. This role does not directly administer Entra ID, Azure, or the Fabric tenant.

• Apply least-privilege and security-by-design principles to semantic model development and deployment.

Standards, Governance, and Team Enablement

• Contribute to and help maintain standards for semantic model design, naming, documentation, source control, code review, deployment, refresh, monitoring, and production support.

• Create reusable technical patterns, templates, checklists, and troubleshooting guidance for the Analytics team.

• Provide technical consultation and hands-on support to analysts and BI developers working with Fabric and Power BI semantic models.

• Participate in project planning, technical design reviews, deployment readiness reviews, and post-release support.

• Stay current with relevant Microsoft Fabric and Power BI capabilities and assess their practical application within the organization.

Required Qualifications

• At least 3 years of hands-on experience with Power BI, including experience developing and supporting production semantic models.

• Demonstrated experience with incremental refresh, large semantic models, XMLA endpoints, Tabular Editor, semantic model metadata, and performance troubleshooting.

• Strong SQL skills and the ability to query, review, and validate data in Snowflake and Fabric SQL environments.

• Practical intermediate-level experience with Git-based source control, including branches, pull requests, versioning, and code review practices.

• Experience promoting Power BI or Fabric artifacts across Development, Test/UAT, and Production environments using deployment pipelines or comparable release processes.

• Experience configuring and troubleshooting semantic model refreshes, connections, gateways, credentials, and production dependencies.

• Experience implementing and validating row-level security and semantic model security roles.

• Ability to interpret Microsoft technical documentation, identify tenant-controlled features, and coordinate effectively with IT administrators.

• Strong troubleshooting, documentation, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

• Ability to support occasional planned production releases outside normal business hours.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience optimizing DAX, relationships, model size, cardinality, and query performance.

• Advanced Power BI development experience, including calculation groups, composite models, DirectQuery, Direct Lake, or reusable enterprise measures.

• Experience with Fabric capacity monitoring, Capacity Metrics, usage analysis, and workload performance management.

• Experience with Power BI/Fabric REST APIs, PowerShell, TMSL, TMDL, Tabular Object Model, or other deployment and model-management automation.

• Experience implementing CI/CD automation through Azure DevOps or a comparable platform.

• Experience with Fabric workspaces, Dataflows Gen2, Warehouses, Lakehouses, OneLake, notebooks, or Fabric pipelines.

• Experience working in a regulated healthcare or similarly controlled data environment.

• Microsoft certifications such as Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate or Power BI Data Analyst Associate. Certifications are valued but not required.

Key Technical Skills

Category Skills and Technologies Core Microsoft Fabric; Power BI semantic models; Fabric SQL; Snowflake; SQL; XMLA; Tabular Editor; incremental refresh; large semantic models DevOps Git; PBIP; branching; pull requests; code review; deployment pipelines; Development/Test/UAT/Production promotion Operations Refresh scheduling; partition management; gateway troubleshooting; performance analysis; monitoring; production support Security Row-level security; semantic model roles; workspace and model permissions; security testing and documentation Preferred DAX optimization; Capacity Metrics; REST APIs; PowerShell; TMSL/TMDL; Tabular Object Model; CI/CD automation

Success Measures

• Production semantic models are reliable, secure, documented, supportable, and aligned with approved architecture standards.

• Refresh failures and model performance issues are detected, diagnosed, communicated, and resolved within agreed service expectations.

• Deployments across Development, Test/UAT, and Production are controlled, repeatable, validated, and recoverable.

• Source control, documentation, review, and governance standards are consistently applied across Analytics team projects.

• Analytics team members receive timely technical support and reusable guidance for working within the Fabric and Power BI ecosystem.

• Coordination with Data Engineering and IT results in clear ownership, well-defined requests, and efficient resolution of cross-platform issues.

Role Boundaries

This position is centered on Power BI semantic model engineering and the operational lifecycle of the Microsoft Fabric analytics environment. It is not primarily an end-user report developer, enterprise Data Engineer, Azure administrator, Entra ID administrator, or Fabric tenant administrator. The engineer works closely with those functions and provides the technical analysis and documentation needed to coordinate changes and resolve issues.