PAHO Consultant - Data, Analytics, and AI (ITS)

OBJECTIVE OF THE OFFICE/DEPARTMENT

This is a requisition for employment at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)/Regional Office of the World Health Organization (WHO)

Contractual Agreement:

Non-Staff - International PAHO Consultant

Job Posting:

August 21, 2026

Closing Date:

September 20, 2026, 11:59 PM Eastern Time

Primary Location:

Off Site

Organization:

ITS Information Technology Services

Schedule:

Full time

PURPOSE OF CONSULTANCY

This requisition is for a consultancy at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)/Regional Office of the World Health Organization (WHO).
1. Objective of the Department
The Information Technology Services Department (ITS) provides leadership and direction in the deployment of information and communication technologies and systems to support the Pan American Health Organization/Regional Office of the Americas of the World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) in carrying out its mandate. ITS establishes and maintains strategies, policies, standards, and procedures to ensure the effective and efficient provision of information and communication services in a geographically dispersed environment.

2. Purpose of the Consultancy
PAHO operates Microsoft Fabric as its corporate data and analytics platform. The environment consolidates information from the Organization’s enterprise systems, including the Workday-based PAHO Management Information System (PMIS), corporate applications, and technical data sources, into a common lakehouse and semantic layer that supports institutional reporting, dashboards, and analytical services used by Headquarters, country offices, and centers across the Region of the Americas. Current architecture is built on Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake, and SQL Managed Instance architecture, with BI workspaces provisioned in MS Fabric capacities.The platform has grown substantially in scope, data volume, and user base since its adoption, and now underpins reporting relied upon for management and technical decision-making. To sustain this growth and prepare the environment for AI-enabled analytics, PAHO requires an experienced Data, Analytics and AI consultant who can operate the platform on a day-to-day basis while establishing an engineering-grade foundation for its next phase: a complete and maintained architecture and operations baseline, documented platform standards, measurable capacity and cost efficiency, and a progressive Fabric adoption plan with prioritized evolution roadmap for ITS management decision.
This is a hands-on, delivery-focused technical consultancy that combines daily platform operations and support with platform engineering, modernization, and innovation. The consultant will report to the Senior Advisor Applications Development and Support. The consultant will collaborate with ITS units, data and application owners, subject matter experts, and departments across PAHO. The consultant works autonomously against an assigned and prioritized task backlog, delivers within agreed timeframes, and reports formally each month.

DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES:

3. Statement of Work

The Data, Analytics and AI consultant will perform the following functions:

3.1 Task Management & Stakeholder Coordination

• Review the assigned work queue each working day; acknowledge new tasks; confirm scope, priority, acceptance criteria, dependencies, effort, and target completion date.
• Deliver tasks by the agreed due date. If delivery is at risk, notify the Senior Advisor Applications Development and Support, promptly and propose a recovery plan or revised date for approval.
• Keep task records current with progress, decisions, blockers, testing evidence, deployment status, and next actions.
• Work with ITS units, data owners, and PAHO departments to gather requirements, assess impacts, translate needs into feasible solutions, and demonstrate completed work.

3.2 Fabric Platform Operations & Administration

• Operate and support Fabric capacities, tenant settings, domains, workspaces, gateways and connectivity, OneLake, Lakehouses, Warehouses, SQL endpoints, Data Factory items, notebooks, semantic models and related Power BI services.
• Monitor capacity utilization, throttling, job concurrency, pipeline and notebook execution, refreshes, query performance, failures, costs and service health; tune or scale workloads within approved limits.
• Investigate incidents and recurring failures across ingestion, transformation, storage, semantic models, gateways, access and reports; document root cause, corrective action and prevention when required.
• Maintain schedules, service identities, connections, credentials, operational checks, recovery procedures and support runbooks for production services.
• Provide level 2/3 support and coordinate with Microsoft, UNICC, vendors and internal teams when an issue requires escalation.
• Operate and administer the Microsoft Fabric estate on a daily basis, including tenant settings, domains, workspace structures, item lifecycle, licensing assignment, and platform configuration in line with PAHO governance requirements.
• Manage capacity provisioning, utilization monitoring, throttling and smoothing analysis, workload isolation, and cost optimization on F-SKU capacities using the Fabric Capacity Metrics App; maintain a consumption forecast against contracted entitlement.
• Monitor and support pipelines, Dataflows Gen2, notebooks, warehouse and lakehouse workloads, and semantic model refreshes; resolve failures, latency, and performance degradation; identify root causes and sustainable corrective actions.
• Maintain and improve deployment pipelines, workspace Git integration, and environment promotion across development, test, and production.
• Own backup, resiliency, and recovery for OneLake data and workspace artifacts, including documented and periodically tested recovery procedures for production workloads.
• Handle incidents, service requests, problems, and changes through PAHO’s corporate IT service management platform, respecting agreed service levels and change control requirements.

3.3 Data Engineering, Integration & Semantic Modeling

• Design, build, and maintain ingestion and transformation processes using Fabric Data Factory pipelines, Dataflows Gen2, Spark notebooks, shortcuts, and mirroring, applying incremental and cost-efficient patterns.
• Implement and maintain a medallion (bronze / silver / gold) structure with explicit ownership, contracts, and quality controls between layers.
• Develop, maintain, and troubleshoot integrations with PAHO corporate systems — in particular the Workday-based PMIS covering human resources, finance, procurement, and grants data — as well as Salesforce, SharePoint, SQL sources, and external data providers, using approved APIs, report-as-a-service extracts, event-driven patterns, and secure authentication mechanisms.
• Design and maintain dimensional and semantic models (star schema, slowly changing dimensions, Direct Lake), DAX measures, certified datasets, and row-level and object-level security aligned to PAHO’s data access rules.
• Implement data quality, reconciliation, validation, and lineage controls; investigate and resolve data discrepancies with the relevant data owners and document the outcome.
• Provide second-level technical support and guidance to PAHO report developers and business power users on modeling, performance, and reporting standards.

3.4 Platform Baseline, Standards & Evolution Roadmap

• Establish and thereafter maintain a complete and current baseline of the Fabric environment, covering architecture, domain and workspace structure, capacity allocation, data sources and flows, semantic models, security model, integrations, dependencies, operational procedures, and ownership, so that the platform can be operated and handed over by any qualified engineer without reliance on undocumented knowledge.
• Review the current configuration of capacity, workspaces, pipelines, semantic models, and security against Microsoft reference architecture, well-architected guidance, and PAHO standards; document deviations, risks, technical debt, and remediation options with associated effort and benefit estimates.
• Identify, quantify, and — once approved — implement optimization opportunities across capacity consumption and cost, refresh and query performance, pipeline design, storage, and licensing.
• Define, document, and apply platform engineering standards covering naming conventions, workspace and domain strategy, environment separation, source control and CI/CD, promotion and change gates, monitoring and alerting, data quality, and documentation.
• Produce and maintain a prioritized twelve-to-eighteen-month evolution roadmap for the data and analytics platform, covering architecture, governance, capacity, integration, semantic layer, and AI enablement, sequenced with effort, dependencies, risks, cost implications, and resourcing requirements, for ITS management decision.
• Provide ITS management with objective, evidence-based analysis of platform health, risk exposure, and improvement priorities on a recurring basis.

3.5 AI-Enabled Analytics & Innovation

• Assess, pilot, and where approved operationalize Fabric-native AI capabilities, including Copilot in Fabric and Power BI, data agents, AI functions in notebooks, and semantic model preparation for natural-language querying.
• Build AI-ready data products and semantic layers that can be securely grounded and consumed by PAHO’s Copilot Studio and Power Platform agent portfolio, Azure AI services, and other approved AI solutions.
• Propose and prototype practical, measurable use cases — such as automated data quality and anomaly detection, forecasting, natural-language reporting, and document or text analytics — presenting expected benefit, consumption impact, and cost before any scaling decision.
• Apply PAHO’s AI governance, data protection, information classification, and responsible AI requirements; document grounding sources, guardrails, evaluation scenarios, known limitations, and human oversight arrangements.
• Monitor the Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI roadmap and advise ITS on which capabilities are sufficiently mature for institutional adoption and which should remain experimental, with a clear rationale in each case.

3.6 Security, Governance & Compliance

• Apply least-privilege access controls across tenant, domain, workspace, item, and data levels, including workspace roles, sharing settings, and conditional access aligned with PAHO requirements.
• Manage Microsoft Entra ID service principals and app registrations used for Fabric and Power BI automation, including permission scoping, API access configuration, and credential and secret rotation.
• Administer and validate row-level and object-level security in semantic models, including membership-based security patterns and deployment-time integrity checks.
• Support Microsoft Purview integration, sensitivity labels, data loss prevention policies, cataloguing, and audit logging in line with approved governance standards.
• Collaborate with ITS Information Security on reviews, incidents, access recertification, integration dependencies, and remediation activities; do not implement unapproved production changes.

3.7 Documentation, Reporting & Knowledge Transfer

• Maintain architecture and configuration records, solution designs, data dictionaries, lineage documentation, integration specifications, test evidence, deployment records, runbooks, and task history for all material changes.
• Store all code, notebooks, pipeline definitions, configuration, documentation, and work products in PAHO-approved repositories, with version control applied.
• Provide demonstrations, walkthroughs, and structured knowledge-transfer sessions to PAHO staff and authorized support resources, including hands-on enablement on the standards and procedures established.
• Submit the required monthly activity report and support any ITS reporting requirements toward PAHO management and governance bodies.

4 Monthly Activity Report

By the last working day of each month, the consultant shall submit a consolidated report to the Advisor, IT Operations. The report shall be traceable to the designated task-management system and include:

• An executive summary and a complete register of every task assigned during the month, plus open tasks carried forward.
• For each task: identifier, title, requester or owner, assignment date, priority, agreed due date, status, completion date, and task-record reference.
• For each task: a concise summary of work performed, changes made, testing and approval completed, deployment outcome, documentation produced, and result achieved.
• For delayed, blocked, cancelled, or re-scoped tasks: reason, impact, required action, mitigation, and approved revised date; plus priorities for the following month.
• Platform operations for the period: pipeline and semantic model refresh success rates, incidents and problems, production changes and releases, and preventive actions taken.
• Fabric capacity utilization and consumption against contracted entitlement, with a projection to the end of the contract period, plus cost optimization actions taken or proposed.
• Progress against the baseline documentation, standards, and evolution roadmap deliverables, including documentation coverage of production workspaces, pipelines, and semantic models.
• Risks, technical debt, security findings, recommendations, and planned focus for the following month.

A task is considered delivered when deployed to production, verified against the agreed acceptance criteria, documented, and accepted by the requester. Certification of the monthly deliverable is contingent on receipt of a complete monthly report.

5. Qualifications & Skills

5.1 Education & Experience

• University degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related field from a recognized institution.
• At least five years of progressively responsible experience in data engineering, analytics, and business intelligence in complex enterprise environments, of which at least three years in a large, multi-location or multi-entity organization.
• At least two years of hands-on production experience with Microsoft Fabric since its general availability, complemented by prior Power BI Premium and/or Azure Synapse Analytics experience.
• Demonstrated responsibility for a Microsoft Fabric environment at organizational scale, including capacity administration, domain and workspace design, CI/CD, security, and platform standards, and not solely report or pipeline development.
• Demonstrated experience documenting, rationalizing, and modernizing an existing analytics environment that has grown organically, including establishing standards and defining a subsequent evolution roadmap adopted by management.
• Advanced SQL and Python (PySpark); experience with Delta Lake and Parquet; proven experience in dimensional and semantic modeling and advanced DAX.
• Demonstrated experience integrating enterprise SaaS and ERP systems with analytics platforms using APIs, connectors, and event-driven patterns. Experience integrating Workday (report-as-a-service, Workday APIs, Prism Analytics) with Microsoft Fabric or Azure data platforms is highly desirable.
• Practical experience with AI-enabled analytics, including Copilot in Fabric or Power BI, data agents, Azure OpenAI, retrieval and embedding pipelines, together with the judgement to assess maturity, cost, and institutional readiness realistically. Highly desirable.
• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously, manage a prioritized backlog, maintain accurate work records, document rigorously, deliver by agreed deadlines, and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

5.2 Technical Competencies

Fabric Platform & Administration: Tenant and domain administration, workspace strategy, F-SKU capacity provisioning, Capacity Metrics App, throttling and smoothing analysis, workload isolation, cost optimization, OneLake storage and shortcuts, licensing strategy, on-premises and VNet data gateways, Private Link and managed private endpoints, Admin Monitoring Workspace, backup and disaster recovery for analytics platforms

Data Engineering & Integration: Fabric Data Factory pipelines, Dataflows Gen2, Spark notebooks, mirroring, medallion architecture, incremental and change data capture patterns, REST APIs, event-driven integration, Workday and ERP data extraction, SQL Server and Azure data services, PySpark, Delta Lake, Parquet

Semantic Modeling & Analytics: Star schema and dimensional design, Direct Lake and import models, tabular modeling, advanced DAX, certified datasets, Power BI report and deployment pipelines, performance tuning, self-service enablement, data quality and reconciliation controls

AI & Advanced Analytics: Copilot in Fabric and Power BI, data agents and AI functions, semantic model preparation for natural-language querying, Azure OpenAI, retrieval-augmented generation and embedding pipelines, grounding on governed data, evaluation and guardrails, responsible AI and AI governance practice

Security, Governance & Compliance: Microsoft Entra ID service principals and app registrations, permission scoping and secret rotation, workspace and item permissions, row-level and object-level security, Microsoft Purview, sensitivity labels, data loss prevention, audit logging, data classification and protection

DevOps & Delivery: Fabric Deployment Pipelines, workspace Git integration, Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, Fabric REST API and PowerShell automation, branching and release governance, environment promotion and change gates, Agile or Kanban working, backlog management, effort estimation, technical documentation and runbooks

5.3 Certifications

Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate (DP-700) and/or Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (DP-600) is required or strongly preferred. Power BI Data Analyst Associate (PL-300), Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305), Azure AI Engineer Associate (AI-102), and Information Protection and Compliance Administrator (SC-400) certifications are desirable.

6. Language Skills

English: Fluency in written and spoken English is required.

Other languages: Working knowledge of Spanish is desirable; knowledge of French or Portuguese is an asset.

7. Key Performance Indicators

• Assigned tasks delivered by the agreed target date
  • Target: ≥ 90%
  • Measured: Monthly

• Scheduled pipeline and semantic model refresh success rate
  • Target:≥ 98%
  • Measured: Monthly

• Critical (P1) data platform incidents attributable to consultant-delivered changes
  • Target: Zero
  • Measured: Continuous

• Fabric capacity consumption within contracted entitlement
  • Target: No unforecast overage
  • Measured: Monthly

• Baseline, standards, and roadmap deliverables accepted by the agreed dates
  • Target: 100%
  • Measured: Per Milestone

• Production workspaces, pipelines, and semantic models covered by current documentation
  • Target: 100% by end of contract
  • Measured: Quarterly

• Security findings remediated within the agreed window
  • Target: 100%
  • Measured: Monthly

• Approved AI use cases prototyped with documented benefit and cost analysis
  • Target: Per agreed plan
  • Measured: Quarterly

• Monthly report submitted complete and on time
  • Target: By 5th working day
  • Measured: Monthly

8. Work Schedule & Conditions

Position: Data, Analytics and AI Consultant – Microsoft Fabric Platform

Work type: Full-time Consultancy

Duty Station: Remote (Off-Site)

Duration: 6 months, extendable subject to performance and availability of funds

Position Type: Band A of International PAHO Consultant (IPC-Band A)

Reporting To: Senior Advisor Applications Development and Support

Remuneration: Daily rate $215