Fabric Platform Admin

Microsoft Fabric & Power BI Platform Administrator

ABOUT THE ROLE

Our analytics estate runs on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI: hundreds of workspaces, a large self-service community, and a regulated environment where access control, traceability and data integrity are not optional.

The platform is also moving fast. Copilot and data agents put generative AI in front of business users, Fabric IQ adds an ontology-based semantic layer, and Fabric Apps turn workspaces into a home for real, write-enabled applications each with its own tenant settings, capacity cost and compliance question. Someone has to decide how they get switched on, for whom, and under which controls.

We are looking for an administrator who treats the platform as a product: someone who automates rather than clicks, who can tell you exactly which capacity is throttling and why, and who keeps a GxP-relevant estate auditable without becoming a bottleneck for the business. This is a hands-on engineering role, not a ticket queue.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

Tenant & capacity administration

• Tenant settings, domains, workspaces, capacities (F SKUs) and delegated capacity settings.
• Capacity health and cost: smoothing, bursting, throttling, background vs. interactive operations. Right-size, forecast, and support chargeback to business units.
• OneLake, deployment pipelines, Git integration and CI/CD for Fabric items (fabric-cicd, Fabric REST APIs).
• On-premises and VNet gateway clusters, connections, and service principal / workspace identity access to source systems (SNOW, Veeva, EDP, ERP).
• Incident response and root-cause analysis on refresh failures, performance degradation and access issues; evaluation of preview features before they reach users.

Automation & monitoring, the core of this job

• FUAM (Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring) as the backbone of tenant observability: deploy it, keep it current with upstream releases, extend it, and turn its output into operational decisions.
• Administration automated with PowerShell (MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt, Az, Microsoft.Graph) and Python (semantic-link-labs, notebooks) against the Admin, Scanner and REST APIs: provisioning, access reviews, orphaned-item cleanup, licence reclamation, tenant-setting drift detection.
• That automation runs properly, Azure DevOps pipelines, Azure Automation/Functions with logging, alerting and error handling.
• Observability beyond FUAM where needed: Workspace Monitoring (Eventhouse), Log Analytics, Capacity Metrics, Purview Audit.

AI & new workloads

• Copilot configuration: the Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service tenant settings, delegation to capacity administrators, security-group scoping, and the data-residency choices behind them.
• The cost of AI: Copilot and agents bill against capacity, so track CU impact and assess whether a dedicated Fabric Copilot capacity makes sense.
• Fabric data agents: who may build them, on which sources, how they are validated, and what changes when they are surfaced through Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio or MCP.
• Fabric IQ readiness (Ontology, graph, agents) and administration of Fabric Apps workload enablement, operational vs. data apps, the Rayfin CLI, and a review path for anything that writes data back.

Governance & compliance

• The workspace, domain and naming model, and the promotion path from self-service sandbox to certified content.
• Access through Entra ID groups and service principals: least privilege, segregation of duties, periodic access reviews and recertification.
• Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels and DLP across Fabric and Power BI items.
• Qualification and validation under GxP, GAMP 5, 21 CFR Part 11 and EU Annex 11: change control, IQ/OQ evidence, audit trails, ALCOA+ data integrity, periodic review and audit support.
• Escalation point and standards owner for the Power BI developer and analyst community.

WHAT YOU BRING

Required

• 10+ years administering Power BI at enterprise scale, with demonstrable hands-on Fabric experience (capacities, workspaces, domains, OneLake, deployment pipelines).
• Strong PowerShell scripting plus practical use of the Fabric / Power BI REST, Admin and Scanner APIs. You automate recurring work by default.
• Working knowledge of FUAM, or an equivalent tenant-monitoring solution you have built or operated yourself.
• Entra ID, service principals, RBAC, Microsoft Purview and sensitivity labels.
• Copilot in Fabric from the administrator's side: tenant and capacity-level settings, scoping, CU consumption, data-residency implications.
• Git-based ALM and CI/CD for BI artefacts.
• Capacity troubleshooting: you can read the Capacity Metrics app and explain a throttling event to an engineer and to a business director.
• Strong motivation to drive change management and user adoption.
• SQL and semantic model fundamentals (star schema, DAX, RLS).

Nice to have

• Pharma, biotech, medical devices or another regulated industry: validated systems, CSV/CSA, data integrity.
• Preview-stage exposure to Fabric IQ, data agents or Fabric Apps (Rayfin SDK/CLI).
• Python for administrative automation; enough TypeScript/GraphQL awareness to review what teams build on Fabric Apps.
• Certification: DP-600, DP-700 or PL-300.
• Premium-to-Fabric capacity migration, or migration from a legacy BI stack.