We’re looking for: Data Product & Platform Operations Engineer

Background:

Inter IKEA Systems is strengthening Business Insights and the Self-Service Data Platform (SSDP) to support centrally managed reporting, governed self-service, data products, and CORE-related delivery for IKEA retailers. Business Insights is developing and operating reporting solutions using Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Fabric, while SSDP is establishing a governed and scalable platform for domain-owned data products. This new role strengthens SSDP in hands-on data-product engineering, operational governance, platform operations, observability, and FinOps. The consultant will turn platform standards into repeatable operational practice, increase engineering capacity for CMD, Sales, and future data products, and provide supporting data-engineering and cost-visibility capability to Business Insights. The consultant’s primary home will be SSDP, with a planned secondary contribution to Business Insights based on priorities.

The scope of the consultant services is to assist IKEA in:

• Build and operate data products on Microsoft Fabric from ingestion through consumption-ready layers.

• Implement operational governance, data quality, metadata, catalog, lineage, and ownership controls.

• Establish monitoring, incident routines, service-level tracking, and FinOps practices.

• Increase hands-on data-engineering capacity across SSDP and provide targeted support to Business Insights.

The main tasks in the assignment are as below:

• Build data products on Microsoft Fabric end to end, including ingestion, Bronze, Silver, and Gold transformation, modeling, and publication.

• Develop reusable templates, parameterized pipelines, metadata-driven ingestion, notebook libraries, and delivery patterns.

• Implement data contracts, metadata standards, lifecycle controls, and ownership information.

• Contribute delivery capacity for CMD, Sales, and future domain data products, and support Business Insights with Gold-layer preparation where needed.

• Implement and operate catalog, lineage, classification, ownership, and data quality using Microsoft Purview and/or Fabric-native capabilities.

• Define and implement quality checks, validation rules, certification criteria, and operational controls.

• Build and maintain operational dashboards for platform health, pipeline reliability, refresh status, usage, incidents, and cost.

• Track SLAs and SLOs and establish incident routines, runbooks, support processes, and continuous improvement actions.

• Manage day-to-day FinOps, including Fabric capacity utilization, cost allocation, showback, anomaly detection, and optimization recommendations.

• Support onboarding of domain teams to SSDP standards and ways of working.

Desired knowledge, experience, competence, skills etc:

• Microsoft Purview, including catalog, lineage, Data Map, and quality capabilities.

• Fabric operations experience, including Capacity Metrics App, Monitoring Hub, workspace monitoring, and usage reporting.

• Data-quality tooling such as Great Expectations, dbt tests, or equivalent.

• FinOps or cloud-cost-management experience and relevant certification.

• SLA and SLO tracking, incident management, and platform-support processes.

• Data contracts, domain-owned data products, and data-product lifecycle management.

• CI/CD and automated testing for data pipelines.

• CDC and event-driven ingestion.

• Relevant certification such as DP-700.

• Able and willing to work across both Business Insights and SSDP, with approximately 20–30% allocation to the secondary team as priorities require.

• Comfortable working in a platform-building environment where not everything is fully defined.

• Creates clear documentation, reusable patterns, and knowledge-sharing practices as part of normal delivery.

• Collaborates effectively with technical and business stakeholders, including IKEA retailer and franchisee contacts where relevant.

• Works transparently with backlogs, priorities, delivery plans, and agile ways of working.

• Communicates clearly in English and actively reduces single-person dependency.

Following competences must be fulfilled:

• Strong hands-on data engineering using PySpark or Spark, SQL, Python, pipeline orchestration, and incremental-loading patterns.

• Hands-on Microsoft Fabric experience, or strong Databricks or Synapse experience with a clear transfer path to Fabric, including Lakehouse, notebooks, pipelines, and OneLake or equivalent concepts.

• Experience building reusable pipelines and data products using frameworks and templates rather than only one-off deliveries.

• Practical governance-implementation experience involving data quality, metadata, catalog tooling, documentation, and operational controls.

• Experience with monitoring, operational reporting, platform support, and troubleshooting.

• Strong scripting and automation capability.

• Ability to work across technical teams, governance stakeholders, and business stakeholders with strong documentation discipline.

• Minimum approximately five years of relevant data-engineering experience with operations or governance exposure.

Assignment Details:

Start Date: 1st of September 2026.

End Date: 31st of December 2026.

Estimated amount of hours: Expected workload is 100%.

Option to Extend: Yes, subject to business need, performance, and approval.

Primary Working Site: Hybrid – Malmö, Sweden, with onsite presence as agreed with the manager and remote work otherwise possible.

Travel required outside primary working site: Occasional travel may be required and will be agreed in advance.

Overtime or on/call expected: Not normally expected. Limited support during critical releases or incidents may be requested by prior agreement.

Remote/off-site work possible: Yes, within the agreed hybrid setup and IKEA security requirements.

Workload in %: 100%.