Data/BI Engineer | 3 Month Contract | (Outside IR35) | Hybrid, Enfield, London| Starting ASAP

Day Rate: £400

About the Role:

Our client is a growing UK retail business investing in a significant technology modernisation programme, including a new digital platform, API-led integrations, and the rollout of Microsoft Fabric. With executive sponsorship and a defined target architecture already in place, the business is now looking to build its data capability.

Reporting is currently heavily reliant on manual processes, with data sourced from multiple systems and prepared before insights can be delivered. The organisation has invested in Microsoft Fabric to create a more scalable, automated, and self-service data environment.

This role will lead the delivery of a greenfield Microsoft Fabric platform, building the agreed architecture from the ground up and enabling improved reporting, analytics, and business insight across the organisation.

Main Duties

  • Design and build a Microsoft Fabric data platform based on an agreed target architecture.
  • Develop scalable data ingestion pipelines from multiple business systems using reusable, best-practice patterns.
  • Implement a Lakehouse architecture, including Bronze, Silver and Gold data layers.
  • Consolidate and standardise core business data, including store, product and operational data, to create a single source of truth.
  • Deliver governed semantic models and Power BI reporting, replacing manual data preparation and reporting processes.
  • Implement monitoring, orchestration, data quality controls, CI/CD processes and source control using Git.
  • Develop analytics solutions that provide insight into sales, stock, product performance and margin.
  • Build secure, role-based reporting for franchise and operational teams, including row-level security where required.
  • Support the development of operational and workforce performance reporting use cases.
  • Produce technical documentation, runbooks and knowledge transfer materials to ensure the platform can be supported and enhanced internally.
  • Work closely with business stakeholders and technical partners to ensure successful delivery of the data platform roadmap.

Essential Skills & Experience:

Core: Microsoft Fabric - OneLake, Lakehouse, Warehouse, Data Factory pipelines, Dataflows Gen2, notebooks (PySpark / Spark SQL), mirroring, shortcuts, capacity management · Power BI - semantic models, Direct Lake, DAX, row-level security, deployment pipelines · Delta tables · T-SQL · Python · Git / PBIP / TMDL · Azure DevOps · Entra ID

Environment: Azure · SQL Server (legacy, being migrated) · SharePoint · retail point-of-sale and warehouse ERP systems · e-commerce platform migration in flight

  • Production Microsoft Fabric delivery, hands-on, recently. You must have built and shipped a Fabric platform end to end
  • Advanced Power BI data modelling and DAX. Star schemas, complex measures, time intelligence, performance tuning. They should be able to explain the trade-offs between Direct Lake, Import and DirectQuery from experience.
  • Row-level security for external audiences. Dynamic RLS with a user-to-store mapping is central to this role, not a footnote.
  • Data engineering depth. Advanced SQL, Python, incremental and watermark loading patterns, restartable historical loads, orchestration, and a real testing discipline.
  • Git-based development and CI/CD for analytics assets - PBIP / TMDL, deployment pipelines, Azure DevOps or equivalent. No manual publishing to production.
  • Self-sufficiency. There is no data team to lean on and no senior engineer above them.
  • Stakeholder capability. They will run requirements sessions with commercial, finance, operations and franchise stakeholders and turn vague asks into signed specifications.

Desirable Qualifications

  • Multi-site retail, hospitality or food data
  • Multi-entity reporting, where the audiences are legally separate parties
  • Integration with EPOS and warehouse ERP systems where the vendor controls access and pricing constrains what is possible
  • Experience building to an architecture written by someone else, and doing it faithfully
  • Master data management - conforming identifiers across systems that disagree, and holding the line
  • Azure adjacent: Data Lake Storage, Key Vault, Entra ID, Azure SQL
  • Microsoft Purview, sensitivity labelling, data cataloguing
  • Awareness of UK GDPR in an employee-monitoring context
  • Dynamics 365 Business Central data extraction
  • Certification: DP-600, DP-700, PL-300

This role has been deemed Outside IR35 by the client. Applicants must hold, or be happy to apply for, a valid Basic Disclosure Scotland. Please click the link to apply.

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