Technical Specialist Power BI at FNB South Africa

Job Description

• Administer and manage the end-to-end Power BI and Microsoft Fabric platform (Capacities, Workspaces, Tenant Settings). Design and implement Fabric architectures including Lakehouse, Warehouse, Pipelines, Notebooks, Semantic Models, and Dataflows Gen2.
• Manage Power BI Premium / Fabric capacity sizing, scaling, chargeback models, and utilization optimization. Monitor and analyze capacity metrics (CU usage, background operations, interactive workloads, refresh concurrency, throttling). Lead troubleshooting of platform-level issues including refresh failures, throttling, memory pressure, gateway bottlenecks, and service degradation.

Key Responsibilities

Power BI & Microsoft Fabric Platform Administration

• Administer and manage the end-to-end Power BI and Microsoft Fabric platform (Capacities, Workspaces, Tenant Settings). Design and implement Fabric architectures including Lakehouse, Warehouse, Pipelines, Notebooks, Semantic Models, and Dataflows Gen2.
• Manage Power BI Premium / Fabric capacity sizing, scaling, chargeback models, and utilization optimization. Monitor and analyze capacity metrics (CU usage, background operations, interactive workloads, refresh concurrency, throttling). Lead troubleshooting of platform-level issues including refresh failures, throttling, memory pressure, gateway bottlenecks, and service degradation.

On-Premises Data Gateway & Connectivity

• Design, deploy, and maintain enterprise On-Premises Data Gateway clusters (high availability and performance). Configure and tune gateway settings (connection pools, spooling, memory thresholds, concurrency limits).
• Manage secure connectivity to on-prem and cloud data sources (SQL Server, Oracle, Hive/Cloudera, SAP, REST APIs). Diagnose and resolve TLS/SSL, certificate, proxy, DNS, and authentication-related connectivity issues.

Data Infrastructure Engineering (Aligned)

• Design and maintain enterprise-grade data architectures (on-prem and cloud).
• Build data ingestion frameworks, storage solutions, and process pipelines. Integrate Fabric workloads with existing enterprise data platforms and cloud services.
• Ensure system health and performance aligned with SLAs and best practices.
• Optimize infrastructure for analytics workloads (batch, streaming, BI refresh, AI workloads).

Application & Platform Support (Analytics Ecosystem)

• Provide Level 2/3 support for business-critical analytics platforms.
• Conduct root cause analysis on dataset refresh, pipeline, gateway, and capacity incidents.
• Monitor logs, telemetry, Admin APIs, and platform metrics. Manage Severity A incident with Microsoft Support and drive root-cause resolution.

DevOps, Automation & CI/CD (Analytics)

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for Power BI and Fabric artefacts (PBIP projects, Semantic Models, Notebooks, Pipelines). Integrate Power BI/Fabric deployments with Git-based source control (Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, GitHub). Automate platform monitoring, governance checks, and operational reporting using PowerShell, REST APIs, and Admin APIs.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code and configuration management where applicable.

Governance, Security & Compliance

• Ensure compliance with enterprise security, audit, and regulatory requirements. Configure and enforce Power BI tenant settings, workspace governance, endorsement models, and data access controls. Implement secure secret management using Azure Key Vault and approved PAM solutions.
• Apply data security best practices including RLS, sensitivity labels, and information protection.

Stakeholder Engagement & Leadership

• Work closely with business units, BI developers, data engineers, architects, and leadership. Act as the senior technical authority and SME for Power BI and Fabric across the organization. Mentor junior specialists and establish platform standards, runbooks, and best practices.
• Translate technical platform capabilities into business value and operational impact.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in:

• Information Technology
• Computer Science
• Information Systems
• Engineering or related field

Preferred Certifications

• Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate
• AWS Cloud Certification

Experience must include:

• Enterprise Power BI administration (Premium / Fabric Capacities)
• Microsoft Fabric platform design and operations
• On-Premises Data Gateway architecture and performance tuning
• Capacity planning, cost optimization, and platform chargeback models
• Data infrastructure engineering
• Cloud engineering (AWS and/or Azure)
• DevOps automation and CI/CD
• Monitoring & observability tools

End Date: May 15, 2026