Semantic Model Senior Developer
Toronto- Hybrid
Contract
Key Responsibilities
Semantic Model and Cube Development
- Design, develop, enhance, and maintain enterprise-grade Power BI semantic models.
- Develop and support SSAS tabular models and, where applicable, multidimensional OLAP cubes.
- Translate banking and financial-reporting requirements into scalable analytical models.
- Design reusable model components, including tables, relationships, measures, calculation logic, hierarchies, perspectives, and business-friendly metadata.
- Develop complex DAX measures, calculated columns, calculation groups, and time-intelligence solutions.
- Develop and maintain MDX calculations and cube components where multidimensional SSAS is used.
- Create governed and reusable semantic layers that support multiple reports, dashboards, analytical products, and business functions.
- Assess existing cube and semantic-model designs and recommend improvements to scalability, maintainability, usability, and performance.
Data Modelling and Architecture
- Design logical and physical data models using dimensional modelling principles.
- Develop star and snowflake schemas, including fact tables, dimension tables, hierarchies, keys, and relationships.
- Work with enterprise data warehouses, data marts, operational data stores, and cloud-based data platforms.
- Define appropriate model granularity, aggregation strategies, relationship behaviour, and data-access patterns.
- Assist with modernizing legacy cubes and reporting models into Power BI or modern tabular semantic models.
- Ensure semantic models maintain consistent business definitions across reports and consuming applications.
- Maintain clear data lineage between source systems, data-transformation layers, semantic models, and reports.
Power BI Development
- Develop Power BI reports and dashboards based on governed semantic models.
- Build complex and reusable DAX measures to support financial, operational, risk, regulatory, and management reporting.
- Use Power Query and M to clean, transform, and integrate data from multiple sources.
- Configure import, DirectQuery, composite, or live-connection solutions based on business and technical requirements.
- Implement drill-down, drill-through, hierarchies, bookmarks, tooltips, and other analytical capabilities where required.
- Publish and manage semantic models and reports within Power BI Service.
- Configure and troubleshoot scheduled refreshes, gateways, connections, permissions, and deployment activities.
- Support controlled promotion of models and reports across development, testing, UAT, and production environments.
Performance Optimization
- Optimize semantic models, DAX calculations, SQL queries, relationships, and data-refresh processes.
- Analyze slow-running reports and queries and identify model, DAX, storage, or source-system bottlenecks.
- Improve model performance through appropriate schema design, cardinality management, aggregations, partitioning, incremental refresh, and efficient calculation logic.
- Optimize SQL queries, stored procedures, views, indexes, and data-extraction processes supporting semantic models.
- Monitor model size, refresh duration, query response time, capacity usage, and report performance.
- Resolve production issues related to model processing, refresh failures, data latency, security, and report performance.
Mandatory Qualifications
- Minimum 10 years of overall experience in business intelligence, data warehousing, analytics, data modelling, or reporting development.
- Demonstrated professional experience within the banking or financial-services industry.
- Strong hands-on experience designing and developing enterprise Power BI semantic models.
- Strong experience with SSAS Tabular, Azure Analysis Services, or a comparable enterprise tabular modelling platform.
- Experience with SSAS Multidimensional or OLAP cube development is strongly preferred and may be mandatory if the existing environment uses multidimensional cubes.
- Advanced expertise in DAX, including complex measures, filter context, row context, time intelligence, and performance optimization.
- Strong working knowledge of MDX, particularly where legacy or multidimensional cubes are involved.
- Advanced SQL and T-SQL development skills.
- Strong experience in dimensional modelling, including star and snowflake schemas.
- Experience developing fact tables, dimensions, hierarchies, measures, relationships, and calculation logic.
- Strong Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service experience.
- Experience with Power Query and M-based data transformation.
- Experience with enterprise data warehouses and data marts.
- Experience with ETL or ELT technologies such as SSIS, Azure Data Factory, or equivalent platforms.
- Experience implementing data security, including row-level security and role-based access.
- Experience optimizing models, DAX, SQL, refresh processes, and report performance.
- Strong data-validation, reconciliation, testing, and troubleshooting capabilities.
- Ability to translate business requirements into robust technical and data-model designs.
- Strong stakeholder-management, communication, and documentation skills.
- Must be located in Canada or authorized and available to work in Canada, subject to the client’s engagement requirements.
Preferred Qualifications
- Microsoft Power BI certification, such as PL-300 or a comparable current certification.
- Microsoft SQL Server, data-management, Azure, or Microsoft Fabric certification.
- Experience with Azure SQL, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake, Synapse Analytics, or Microsoft Fabric.
- Experience with XMLA endpoints, tabular model metadata, or model-management tools.
- Familiarity with Tabular Editor, DAX Studio, Performance Analyzer, SQL Profiler, or equivalent diagnostic tools.
- Experience with calculation groups, incremental refresh, composite models, aggregations, and large enterprise datasets.
- Experience migrating SSAS cubes or legacy reporting platforms to Power BI semantic models.
- Experience working with CI/CD practices, deployment pipelines, source control, and environment promotion.
- Experience with Python, Alteryx, Apache Spark, or similar data-engineering and analytics technologies.
- Experience leading technical design sessions or mentoring BI and Power BI developers.
- Experience working within a highly governed, regulated, or audit-controlled reporting environment.
