Senior BI Front End Architect

Job Title: Senior BI Front End Architect
Location: Preferred: Twin Cities, Minnesota (St. Paul HQ) Hybrid | Open to Remote in: Alabama (AL), Arizona (AZ), Colorado (CO), Florida (FL), Iowa (IA), Indiana (IN), Mississippi (MS), Minnesota (MN), North Dakota (ND), Nebraska (NE), North Carolina (NC), Nevada (NV), New York (NY), Rhode Island (RI), South Dakota (SD), Texas (TX), Virginia (VA), West Virginia (WV)

Role Summary:
The Senior BI Front End Architect will lead the design and implementation of an enterprise Power BI and Microsoft Fabric platform. This role consolidates multiple reporting environments into a single, governed ecosystem, enhances UX/UI through standardized design, and ensures optimal performance across all devices. While focused on front-end architecture, the role requires strong expertise in data acquisition to ensure semantic models accurately reflect business data from source systems. This is an individual contributor role that includes coaching and mentoring BI developers to elevate team capabilities.

Primary Responsibilities:

Integration & Optimization

• Consolidate existing reporting environments into a unified Power BI Fabric platform (workspaces, semantic models, apps).

• Establish front-end governance: workspace taxonomy, naming conventions, deployment pipelines, and versioning.

• Define and enforce "thin report over certified semantic models" patterns.

• Serve as primary liaison between BI and Data Engineering, translating business reporting needs into data models and pipelines.

• Collaborate with business stakeholders to identify, prototype, and integrate AI/ML insights into reporting solutions.

UX/UI Evolution

• Develop and maintain a Power BI design system (themes, layout patterns, typography, color, accessibility).

• Standardize navigation (app structures, landing pages, bookmarks) and implement mobile-first layouts.

• Build reusable visual templates and measure libraries to accelerate consistent delivery.

Performance Optimization

• Ensure report performance through DAX optimization, model sizing, aggregation/hybrid tables, incremental refresh, and visual/query reduction.

• Monitor and tune Fabric/Power BI capacity using Capacity Metrics; define SLIs/SLOs for open time and interaction latency.

• Establish performance test gates in CI/CD pipelines (Performance Analyzer baselines, dataset refresh thresholds).

Mentorship & Enablement

• Coach BI teams on DAX patterns, modeling, and UX standards.

• Conduct design/code reviews to ensure organizational consistency.

• Document standards, anti-patterns, and "cookbook" guidance for repeatable delivery.

Quality & Governance

• Partner with Data Engineering to align security (RLS/OLS), lineage, and metadata.

• Implement BI deployment processes using ALM Toolkit, Git, and change management.

Technical Stack & Tools:

• Core: Microsoft Fabric, Power BI Desktop/Service, DAX, Power Query (M), Tabular Editor, ALM Toolkit, DAX Studio

• Data/Integration: Fabric Pipelines & Dataflows Gen2, Azure SQL/Synapse, OneLake, Power BI Deployment Pipelines, Azure DevOps

• Monitoring & Operations: Power BI/Fabric Capacity Metrics, Usage Metrics, Purview, Azure Monitor/Log Analytics

• UX/Visualization: Power BI themes (JSON), custom visuals governance, accessibility guidelines (WCAG), mobile layout optimization

Experience Required:

• 8 years in BI/analytics, with 4 years leading Power BI front-end architecture at enterprise scale.

• Proven experience consolidating disparate BI estates into a unified Fabric/Power BI platform.

• Deep expertise in DAX performance tuning, model design, UX patterns, and capacity optimization.

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD for BI (Git, Deployment Pipelines, ALM Toolkit) and production operations.

• Strong collaboration with data engineering, security, and governance teams.

Stakeholder Interaction:

• Translate executive and functional requirements into task-focused, decision-ready reporting.

• Conduct design reviews, office hours, and enablement sessions; serve as a trusted advisor to business leaders.

Key Differentiators:

• Blends design thinking with technical depth-delivers consistent, high-performance experiences.

• Translates complex source system data into simple, trusted, decision-ready insights.

• Proven mentor/coach, raising front-end standards and code quality across teams.

• Mastery of capacity and cost/performance trade-offs in Fabric/Power BI at scale.

Preferred Certifications / Expertise:

• Strongly Preferred:

  • Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (DP 600)

  • Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate (PL 300)

• Nice to Have:

  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate (DP 203)

  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ 305) or Azure Administrator Associate (AZ 104)

  • Power Platform Solution Architect Expert (PL 600)

  • Recognized UX credentials (e.g., NN/g UX Certification) or IAAP CPACC for accessibility awareness