Power BI Developer Job Description and Overview

Microsoft’s Power BI is a leading data visualization program used by businesses to generate lucid, actionable insights from raw data. A Power BI developer uses the software to report and chart granular and multi-source data.

This enhances the client company’s data and business intelligence and allows them to streamline their clerical workflows. For instance, a company might hire you to create a BI tool that:

• Takes on-field data from various sources (POS systems, surveillance cameras, and door sensors)
• Standardizes it into a single, lucid, and easily accessible format
• Uses it to create interactive visual representations like pie charts and bar graphs to illustrate important insights, such as customer traffic measured against the time of the day or day of the week.

As a BI developer, you get to work with a tool that uses cutting-edge machine learning algorithms but is relatively easy to learn and use owing to its user-friendly interface.

This article tells you more about the work of a Power BI developer.

What is Power BI?

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Power BI provides interactive visualizations through services like Power Query and Power Pivot. These take real-world data, put them into a structured format, and then create charts and other visualizations to help your clients make sense of otherwise complex data.

This includes task-specific data models and general analytical dashboards that provide easily accessible insights like net profit and loss and visitor-to-client conversation rates.

The program’s user-friendliness is a core aspect that lets you develop, share, and consume reports and insights in a way that serves your client’s needs. These reports can be accessed remotely through any device with an internet connection and a Power BI application.

Power BI is available on multiple platforms, including:

• Windows desktop application—Power BI Desktop
• Online SaaS—Power BI service
• Power BI mobile app for Windows, Android, and iOS

Power BI developer job description

Let’s explore a standard template for a Power BI job description.

Job title: The most common are senior or subordinate BI developers

Job summary: Interacting with Microsoft’s Power BI to generate, operate, and maintain BI applications that serve to provide the company with actionable business insights.

Qualifications/skills:

• Bachelor’s/master’s degree in Computer Science or Information Systems Technology
• Experience in data preparation and data warehousing projects
• Experience in Microsoft BI stack with Power BI, SSAS, SSRS, SSIS
• Experience in working with Power BI, Tableau, or SAP
• Familiarity with scripting and programming
• Knowledge of SQL server

The main responsibilities of a Power BI developer

A Power BI developer’s main role is to provide business intelligence services, spearhead BI software development, and surface Power BI reports. Simply put, a Power BI developer takes raw data and creates coherent and useful reports to collect meaningful business insights.

An example of this is when a business uses on-field POS data to chart customer traffic against the time of day or day of the week. This can help the business decide when they want extra on-ground staff and when staff can be redirected toward other tasks.

In addition, the responsibilities of a Power BI developer might include collaborating with product teams, business data analysis, project management, strategy development, and managerial duties.

Core responsibilities of a Power BI developer include:

• Proficiency in coding languages like Python and Java
• Some knowledge of UI/UX development
• Sound logical and analytical reasoning skills
• Effective software development life cycle (SDLC) management skills

The other more technical responsibilities of Power BI developers require proficiency and prowess in business intelligence, database, data integration, data modeling, and other technical BI concepts.

Setting business requirements for BI tools

A Power BI developer first locates and understands business requirements through comprehensive analysis of a business’s data through the Power BI software and by speaking with the management team. While some businesses might need a powerful data-crunching tool that provides real-time insights throughout the day (for example, the estimated value of a share), others might simply be looking for a tool that plots lucid bar graphs.

Next, the developer contextualizes these requirements in reference to BI, which helps identify which BI tools and services are needed. While Power BI's data crunching tool might warrant the use of Power Query, its bar graph may use Power Pivot.

Setting business intelligence and analysis requirements before the implementation stage helps in deciphering and addressing project needs.

Translating business requirements into technical tasks

After setting BI requirements in line with business objectives and needs, a Power BI developer translates these into technical tasks, such as normalizing data, filtering out the outliers, and then running the data through a set algorithm—which might be the mathematical formula for the estimated share price of a public company, for example.

After verifying business objectives and requirements and monitoring them consistently, a developer finalizes Power BI solutions. Power BI developers ensure that these technical requirements and solutions are easily adaptable.

Leading BI software development

A Power BI analyst makes decisions and handles the completion of technical tasks during the software development stage. From making strategic decisions to deployment, a Power BI developer spearheads the entire software development process.

This includes breaking down the entire application into different modules that execute specific tasks, as well as delegating the coding of these modules to junior developers.

Analysts must monitor the development progress constantly and ensure that standard development-deployment cycles are followed.

Creating technical documentation for the BI interface

Technical documentation is key to developing any software, including the BI interface. A Power BI developer creates shareable and integrated reports and dashboard documentation that ease the analysis process.

The BI interface’s technical documentation aims to provide platform users guidance and direction. It essentially serves as a how-to guide that helps users navigate the different modules or services present in the application, understand what input values are fed to them, and learn what output can be expected from them.

Building Analysis Services reporting models

Analysis Services reporting models are engines that help with decision-making and business analytics. A Power BI developer’s job is to create versatile Analysis Services reporting models—charts or graphs that provide information about most sold items, what demographic usually buys them, what time of the day the product is selling the most, and which day of the week is the busiest, for example—that act as semantic data models for business and client reports.

Developing Power BI reports

A developer builds visually appealing and interactive reports, dashboards, and other data models using Power BI scripts.

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Power BI developers ensure that these reports and dashboards perform efficient and structured analysis. From setting business requirements to developing BI reports, a Power BI developer oversees the entire process.

Along with developing new business intelligence reports, you redefine and will need to make technical modifications to improve the effectiveness of the existing BI systems and processes.

This includes making changes to the underlying algorithms and re-evaluating the use of existing services to better meet the business's needs. When the incoming data from a business becomes more complex, for example, a developer might shift from 2D to 3D data models for better, more interactive illustrations.

In a nutshell, a Power BI developer designs and creates BI reports per the business’s technical requirements. The role also involves offering insights, decision-making, and improving the BI software development processes. However, the roles and duties of a Power BI developer can be different from business to business and industry to industry.

Power BI developer salaries and compensation

With most industries using business intelligence for data visualization and analytics, a Power BI developer can get placed in sectors such as software or IT, hospitality, finance, management, consulting, or recruitment.

A typical Power BI developer’s job placement starts at the subordinate level, where they work under a developer or architect. With experience, they can move up the ladder to supervisory, managerial, or even executive levels.

In terms of career advancement, a Power BI developer might apply for the following roles:

• BI architect. A top-level BI professional who handles the development of complex BI systems
• Data architect. A data warehousing professional who handles the development of data models as requested by the data architect
• Data engineer. A programming professional who develops and tests data models
• BI manager. An IT professional who manages the delegation and completion of various tasks during the BI development cycle

The salary and compensation structure for Power BI developers varies based on location, skill, experience, knowledge, and industry. However, on average, an entry-level Power BI developer makes about $61,000 per year.

For a developer with experience working between one to four years and five to nine years, the average compensation is around $71,000 and $87,000, respectively. On average, Power BI developers with more than 10 years of experience make about $99,000 per year.

Get a job as a Power BI developer

If you’re a Power BI developer looking for a job, you can list your services on Upwork. As the world’s human and AI-powered work marketplace, we connect independent developers with businesses and agencies.

You can apply for Microsoft Power BI jobs or look for other freelance opportunities that suit your interests.

The process is easy—the first step involves identifying your skills. Once you’ve done that, you can sign up to Upwork and start finding jobs that resonate with your skill set.

And if you’re a company looking to hire world-class Power BI developers, explore the best freelance Power BI specialists on Upwork. Our experienced and talented developers are ready to help you take your business to the next level.