Data Architect (Johannesburg)

Our client seeks a strategic and forward-thinking Microsoft Fabric Data Architect with proven experience designing and governing enterprise-wide data and analytics ecosystems. Brings strong leadership capability in defining and executing target-state architectures across OneLake, Lakehouse and Warehouse environments, orchestration frameworks, semantic models, and real-time analytics solutions.

Recognised for aligning data architecture with business strategy, ensuring secure, scalable, and cost-efficient platforms that drive measurable outcomes. Experienced in establishing governance frameworks, reference architectures, and best-practice standards that enable high-performing delivery teams. Adept at providing architectural oversight, guiding cross-functional stakeholders, and fostering a data-driven culture within complex, fast-paced environments.

Responsibilities:

• Define and maintain Microsoft Fabric reference architecture (OneLake, Lakehouse/Warehouse, pipelines, notebooks, semantic models).
• Select and implement optimal data patterns (ETL/ELT, batch/streaming, direct lake vs import/direct query).
• Establish and enforce data modelling standards, semantic models, and metric definitions.
• Design governance frameworks, workspace strategies, and security models (RBAC, RLS/OLS, PII handling).
• Plan platform capacity, optimise workloads, and improve performance and cost efficiency.
• Conduct architecture reviews, approve designs, and ensure solution alignment with business goals.
• Mentor engineers and analysts, promoting reusable templates, reference patterns, and best practices.
• Facilitate cross-team alignment on data quality, metric definitions, and delivery standards.
• Produce documentation, CI/CD pipelines, operational runbooks, and incident management resources.

Qualifications and experience:

• Deep hands-on expertise with Microsoft Fabric (Lakehouse, Warehouse, OneLake, semantic models, pipelines/dataflows, Spark)
• Experience in Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse, Azure Databricks, Ms Fabric
• Strong SQL and advanced data modelling skills
• Proven experience in enterprise governance, RLS/OLS, and secure-by-design architectures
• CI/CD and Git-based deployment experience
• Excellent documentation and stakeholder communication skills
• 12+ years in data/BI/analytics, with 2–5+ years in an architecture or lead role
• Experience delivering enterprise data platforms or cloud migrations
• Desirable certifications: DP-600 – fabric analytics engineer associate/DP-700 – fabric data engineer associate/ AZ-305 – Azure solutions architect expert