Lead Fabric Data Engineer

Lead Fabric Data Engineer * Rate: £500-550 per day (Outside IR35) * Duration: 6 Months (Initial) * Location: Manchester onsite 2 days per week * Project Status: Greenfield / Core Architecture Phase

The Project

We are partnering with an enterprise organisation consolidating its legacy data footprint into a single, unified analytical layer built on Microsoft Fabric.

This is not a legacy maintenance role. Lead Fabric Data Engineer will step in as the technical lead to architect, build, and deploy a modern end-to-end OneLake foundation, automated ETL pipelines, and performance-optimised semantic models across core data domains. This project is highly structured with defined milestones, mature CI/CD deployment pipelines, and native Git integration already mapped out.

The Technical Lead Fabric Data Engineer Roadmap:

• Phase 1: Foundation & Governance: Set up Fabric workspaces, F-SKU capacity allocation, and Microsoft Purview RBAC security policies.
• Phase 2: Ingestion & Streaming: Implement Copy Jobs, Dataflow Gen2, and Eventstreams for real-time CDC ingestion into a Bronze Lakehouse.
• Phase 3: Medallion Processing: Develop optimised PySpark/Spark SQL Notebooks transforming data from Bronze to Silver (conformed) and Gold (business aggregates) Delta tables.
• Phase 4: Serving Layer: Model Star/Snowflake schemas, optimising Direct Lake mode for Power BI and deploying GraphQL endpoints.
• Phase 5: DevOps: Connect Fabric development environments to production via automated Azure DevOps / GitHub release pipelines.

Required Technical Experience

• Core Fabric Ecosystem: Proven, production-level experience with OneLake, Delta Lake, and Synapse Data Engineering.
• Ingestion Pipelines: Deep knowledge of Fabric Data Factory, Dataflow Gen2, and Real-Time Intelligence features.
• Advanced Modeling: Expertise in building high-performance Direct Lake semantic models to eliminate Import/DirectQuery latency.
• Enterprise DevOps: Strong experience with Fabric Git integration, deployment pipelines, and Microsoft Purview for data governance.
• Languages: Advanced proficiency in PySpark / Spark SQL.

If interested in this Lead Fabric Data Engineer contract please apply with lastest CV applicants need to be onsite in Manchester 2 days per week.

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