Weekend Data Engineer Contract Jobs in Houston, TX

Job Summary:
Fracht Group - North America is seeking a Senior Data Engineer who will design, build, and own the enterprise data platform to enhance analytics and data-driven decision-making across global operations. The role involves engineering data pipelines, modeling data for analytical workloads, and collaborating with business stakeholders to translate requirements into technical specifications.
Responsibilities:
• Designs, builds, and maintains end-to-end data pipelines across the Microsoft Fabric medallion architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Warehouse) using Spark and PySpark notebooks orchestrated through Fabric Data Pipelines.
• Develops and owns ingestion from multiple heterogeneous source systems, including transactional and TMS databases, CosmosDB document stores, and file-based feeds, applying appropriate replication strategies (Change Data Capture, mirrored or current-state replication, and watermark-based incremental loads).
• Implements robust ELT and ETL patterns: incremental and full-load logic, idempotent MERGE operations, surrogate-key generation, deduplication, typed-NULL handling, and runtime parameterization of load identifiers and lakehouse targets.
• Optimizes pipeline performance, compute and capacity usage, and cost, and ensures the platform scales reliably for a global user base.
• Designs dimensional models (star schema, fact and dimension tables, bridge tables, and slowly changing dimensions) in the Fabric Data Warehouse to support analytical and reporting workloads.
• Authors and maintains performant T-SQL stored procedures, views, and warehouse tables with explicit, well-documented contracts (explicit column lists, typed columns, and semantic ordering).
• Defines data requirements and business logic for new data products and translates them into sound, maintainable warehouse structures.
• Creates and optimizes Power BI semantic models over the warehouse, including complex DAX measures and calculated columns, time intelligence, and Direct Lake or Import configurations.
• Designs, implements, and troubleshoots Row-Level Security (RLS) and user access controls across multiple organizational levels and tenants, including embedded scenarios.
• Provides the engineering foundation for interactive dashboards and supports BI developers and analysts consuming the platform.
• Performs comprehensive data reconciliation and validation, identifies and root-causes discrepancies and anomalies, and remediates defects across the pipeline.
• Owns production incident response for data pipelines and semantic-model refreshes, diagnosing failures, restoring service, and implementing durable fixes.
• Tests changes thoroughly before deployment to ensure accuracy, performance, and functionality across scenarios and environments.
• Establishes and enforces deployment discipline across Dev, UAT, and Production, including source control (Git), branch protection, promotion rules, and release governance for internal and vendor contributors.
• Creates and maintains comprehensive technical documentation covering data sources, lineage, relationships, DAX measures, business logic, runbooks, and known issues, accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Configures monitoring, alerting, and validation routines on critical pipelines and contributes to the team's standards, patterns, and knowledge base.
• Works directly with global business stakeholders to gather requirements and translate them into technical specifications and data products.
• Coordinates with and provides technical oversight of external delivery vendors, and participates in and may lead sprint planning, grooming, and effort estimation.
• Stays current with Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and industry trends; evaluates and recommends new tools and approaches; builds reusable components and frameworks; mentors junior team members; and responds to stakeholder communications within the same business day.
• Performs other related duties as assigned.
Qualifications:
Required:
• Bachelor's degree required in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Data Analytics, or a closely related technical field.
• Minimum of 5 years of progressive experience in data engineering, analytics engineering, or business intelligence; or a Master's degree in a related field plus a minimum of 3 years of relevant specialized experience.
• Demonstrated experience building production data pipelines and dimensional data warehouses on cloud-based data platforms (Microsoft Fabric and/or Azure).
• Proven experience developing complex Power BI semantic models and Row-Level Security in enterprise, multi-site environments.
• Experience working with both cloud and on-premises source systems, and creating and maintaining technical documentation.
• Advanced proficiency with Microsoft Fabric components: Workspaces, OneLake, Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, Data Pipelines, Notebooks, and Semantic Models.
• Strong hands-on Spark and PySpark for large-scale data transformation in notebooks.
• Expert-level SQL and T-SQL for complex queries, stored procedures, optimization, and analysis.
• Proficiency with dbt (data build tool) for SQL-based transformations, including model development, incremental materialization strategies, testing, documentation generation, and integration with version-controlled deployment workflows.
• Advanced knowledge of DAX, including complex measures, time intelligence, and optimization; proficiency with Tabular Editor, ALM Toolkit, and DAX Studio.
• Strong command of data-warehouse and dimensional-modeling concepts: medallion architecture, star schema, fact, dimension, and bridge design, slowly changing dimensions, surrogate keys, and incremental-load patterns.
• Working knowledge of data-replication mechanisms (Change Data Capture and mirrored or current-state replication) and their analytical trade-offs.
• Proficiency in Power Query (M) and Microsoft Excel for data preparation; familiarity with Dataflows Gen2 and/or Azure Data Factory.
• Experience with version control (Git) and deployment and CI/CD practices for data and BI solutions, including environment promotion (Dev to UAT to Prod).
• Familiarity with Azure and Microsoft Entra ID, workspace governance, and Fabric capacity and licensing concepts.
• Excellent technical-writing skills for clear, comprehensive documentation, and strong analytical and troubleshooting ability on complex technical issues.
• Exceptional attention to detail and a strong commitment to data accuracy.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and present to varied audiences.
• Self-motivated, organized, and able to manage multiple priorities and deadlines, working independently with minimal supervision.
• Collaborative team player with a positive, knowledge-sharing attitude and a strong service orientation.
Preferred:
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Analytics, Business Analytics, Information Systems, or a related field is strongly preferred.
• Experience supporting global or multi-site organizations preferred.
• Experience with logistics, supply chain, or freight-forwarding systems (such as CargoWise) is a plus.
• Relevant advanced certifications (Fabric Data Engineer Associate DP-700, Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate DP-600, Azure Data Engineer Associate DP-203) are a plus.
Company:
The Fracht Group is an international freight forwarder and an industry leader in providing general and specialized logistics solutions. Founded in 1955, the company is headquartered in Houston, USA, with a team of 1001-5000 employees. The company is currently Late Stage.