Data Engineer with Microsoft Fabric

Job Title: Data Engineer with Microsoft Fabric

Location: Hartford, CT

Duration: 8 Months + Extension

Bill Rate: $72/hour (C2C)

Job Type: C2C/ 1099 Contract

Client: To Be Discussed Later

Work Authorization: H-1B, OPT-EAD, GC-EAD, -EAD

Job Summary
You will own the design and delivery of data pipelines and analytics models on Microsoft Fabric for a client moving to a unified lake house platform. Working onsite, you are the senior technical voice in the room: you shape the solution design, lead hands-on build, mentor junior developers, and be the day-to-day technical contact for business and IT stakeholders. You are expected to work with minimal supervision and hand over production-ready, governed assets.
Responsibilities:

· Lead design and build of ingestion and transformation pipelines using Fabric Data Factory (pipelines, Dataflows Gen2) and Spark notebooks (PySpark / Spark SQL).

· Define Lakehouse vs Warehouse choices and the medallion (bronze/silver/gold) layering on One Lake with Delta tables, and document the rationale.

· Design and optimize Power BI semantic models, including Direct Lake where appropriate, and guide report developers.

· Lead migration of existing workloads (SSIS, ADF, Synapse, on-prem SQL Server) to Fabric, including assessment, sequencing, and cutover.

· Set up and own CI/CD using Fabric Git integration and deployment pipelines (Azure DevOps or GitHub), including branching strategy and promotion standards.

· Define and enforce security and governance: workspace roles, row/column-level security, sensitivity labels, Purview integration.

· Own performance and capacity management (CU consumption, throttling, SKU sizing inputs), and tune pipelines, Spark jobs, and queries.

· Conduct code and design reviews, set engineering standards, and mentor junior and mid-level developers.

· Run requirement workshops and demos, estimate and break down work, flag risks early, and keep designs and runbooks current.

Mandatory Skills:

· 8+ years in data engineering, with proven end-to-end delivery on Microsoft Fabric: Lakehouse, Warehouse, Data Factory pipelines, notebooks, One Lake shortcuts, production deployment.

· Expert-level SQL (T-SQL) and PySpark/Python, with deep Delta Lake knowledge (ACID, partitioning, optimize/vacuum, schema evolution, performance tuning).

· Strong dimensional modelling and medallion architecture experience, including making and defending design trade-offs.

· Power BI semantic modelling: DAX, Direct Lake vs Import vs Direct Query trade-offs, model performance.

· Experience with incremental loads, CDC patterns, and data quality frameworks at scale.
Git-based version control and CI/CD for data assets, with experience setting it up, not just using it.

· Demonstrated experience leading or mentoring a small team and doing code reviews.
Strong communication skills for working directly with client stakeholders, including senior business and IT leaders.