Fabric Administrator

The Fabric Administrator is the senior technical lead for Microsoft Fabric, responsible for governance, security, and adoption across enterprise analytics. This role collaborates with Data Engineers, BI teams, architects, and business stakeholders to maintain a secure, efficient, and compliant platform. Responsibilities span governance and data classification, identity and security frameworks, capacity management, gateway and connectivity administration, and CI/CD deployment across development, test, and production environments. The Administrator drives operational excellence, resiliency, and platform adoption while supporting enterprise-wide data and analytics objectives in a professional-services setting.

Essential Duties

• Administer Fabric tenant settings, workspace structures, Fabric Domains, and platform configurations across capacities, ensuring alignment with established governance standards. Manage domain-level delegation and data product boundaries across business units in line with data mesh principles.
• Manage capacity provisioning, performance monitoring, utilization analysis, and cost optimization. Oversee capacity throttling, smoothing, and interactive versus background operations, and make pause, resume, and scale decisions on F-SKU capacities using the Fabric Capacity Metrics App.
• Configure and maintain security controls, including role-based access, workspace permissions, sharing settings, and conditional access aligned with enterprise requirements.
• Administer and validate row-level security (RLS) and object-level security (OLS) at the semantic model layer, including role membership models, security-table design, and deployment-time integrity checks (for example, guarding against REST or automated deployments stripping role members).
• Manage Microsoft Entra ID service principals and app registrations, including tenant settings that gate service principal access to Fabric and Power BI APIs, permission scoping, and credential and secret rotation.
• Administer on-premises data gateways and VNet data gateways, including gateway cluster configuration, Private Link and managed private endpoints, and secure hybrid connectivity to on-premises and cloud data sources.
• Administer Microsoft Purview integrations with Fabric, including sensitivity labels, data loss prevention policies, and information protection controls aligned to approved governance standards.
• Configure, maintain, and support CI/CD deployment processes for Fabric artifacts across development, test, and production environments using Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, alongside native Fabric Deployment Pipelines and workspace Git integration.
• Configure and maintain the Admin Monitoring Workspace and tenant-wide dashboards to monitor adoption, usage, and performance effectively.
• Own backup, disaster recovery, and data resiliency for the platform, including OneLake resiliency considerations and documented, tested recovery procedures for production.
• Support incident, change, and release management, including ITSM/ServiceNow workflows, incident response, SLA ownership, participation in scheduled release windows, and enforcement of formal promotion and change gates.
• Provide cost allocation, chargeback, and showback reporting for shared capacity consumed across business units.
• Develop and maintain administration runbooks, operational procedures, and supporting documentation. Assist with implementation and adoption of enterprise governance and security standards.
• Partner with Data Engineers, BI teams, Business Analysts, and business leaders to gather requirements, recommend enhancements, and provide Fabric administration expertise.
• Participate in evaluating and testing AI capabilities within Fabric and Microsoft Purview, providing recommendations for compliant feature implementation in data workflows.
• Monitor AI governance requirements, vendor guidelines, and data retention policies associated with AI services, and support execution of organizational AI governance and compliance measures.

Experience & Skills Required

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Data Engineering, or a related field; OR equivalent professional experience.
• Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (DP-600) or Fabric Data Engineer Associate (DP-700).
• Advanced SQL knowledge for query monitoring, performance tuning, and diagnostic analysis of Fabric workloads, using Medallion Architecture or Lakehouse designs.
• Advanced knowledge of Fabric capacity provisioning, workload oversight, OneLake storage, licensing strategy, cost efficiency techniques, and Power BI administration.
• Advanced expertise across Fabric platform components, including Data Factory, Dataflow Gen2, Notebooks, Lakehouse, Warehouse, Power BI models, and Real-Time Analytics.
• Demonstrated experience administering RLS and OLS in Power BI/Fabric semantic models, including membership-based security patterns and validation of security integrity through deployment.
• Demonstrated experience managing Entra ID service principals and app registrations for Fabric and Power BI automation, including API access configuration and secret management.
• Demonstrated experience administering on-premises and VNet data gateways and secure connectivity (Private Link, managed private endpoints) in hybrid environments.
• At least five years of practical experience with Microsoft Azure services, including storage, identity management, DevOps, and networking.
• Demonstrated implementation experience integrating Microsoft Purview with Fabric, covering sensitivity labels, DLP policies, audit logging, and enterprise data governance frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience deploying Fabric artifacts across environments using CI/CD pipelines, Fabric Deployment Pipelines, PowerShell, the Fabric REST API, and Python-based automation.
• At least two years of hands-on production experience with Microsoft Fabric since its general availability (November 2023), complemented by prior Power BI Premium and/or Azure Synapse Analytics experience.
• Experience with backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity for cloud analytics platforms.
• Experience with multi-tier administration models, role delegation, and scaling platform access controls, while mentoring technical team members and solving complex problems.
• Exceptional communication and documentation skills, with the ability to translate intricate technical concepts into concise runbooks and training resources. Availability to participate in scheduled release windows and provide support during production events when required.
• Ability to travel as needed, up to 5%, to company locations, supplier facilities, or industry events.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting analytics platforms in a regulated or professional-services environment, including data residency, retention, and other requirements.
• Familiarity with data mesh and Medallion Architecture governance at enterprise scale.
• Experience with ServiceNow-based data product onboarding and IT service management workflows.