Freelance BI Architect – Build an AI-First BI Platform from Scratch

Help us build the foundation for our next generation of Business Intelligence.

We are looking for an experienced, hands-onBI Architectto design and build a new AI-first BI platform from the ground up.

You will work closely with our junior BI Specialist and business stakeholders to define the architecture, establish trusted business models and build the first working version of the platform. This is not just an advisory role: we are looking for someone who can make sound architectural decisionsand implement them.

The goal? A scalable and maintainable BI foundation that our internal team can confidently continue developing after your engagement.

The project

We already have an existing BI environment with Tableau dashboards covering areas such as operations, churn and revenue. These reports contain valuable business knowledge, but our underlying operational platform is changing.

Rather than simply reconnecting existing dashboards to new source structures, we want to use this opportunity to rebuild our BI foundation properly.

Our intended core stack is:

• Snowflake– central data warehouse

• Fivetran– managed data ingestion where appropriate

• dbt– transformation, testing, documentation and business modelling

• Tableau– existing reporting environment and functional reference

Our data comes from sources including MariaDB, MongoDB, event-sourced applications, APIs, Google Analytics and Zendesk.

Historical consolidation between our old and new operational platforms isnotpart of this project.

Why AI-first?

We don’t want to build a traditional BI platform and add AI afterwards.

From the start, our architecture and data models should make reliable AI-assisted analytics possible. Think of:

• asking business questions in natural language;

• generating or suggesting dashboards;

• explaining metrics and their definitions;

• proactively identifying anomalies;

• tracing AI-generated answers back to trusted data and calculations.

AI-first doesn’t mean putting a chatbot on top of unstructured data. The foundation needs to consist of clearly defined, governed business models that both people and AI can understand.

We also expect you to challenge us:where does AI genuinely add value, and where is conventional BI the better solution?

The challenge

Our source systems contain plenty of data, but technical data doesn’t automatically represent business reality.

A customer record, for example, isn’t necessarily anactive customer. That might mean someone with at least one active product at a specific point in time – which in turn requires clear definitions for activation, cancellation, product status and historical changes.

Together with stakeholders, you’ll turn concepts like these into clear, documented and testable business definitions.

These governed models will become the trusted foundation for dashboards, analysis and AI-generated answers.

What you’ll do

You’ll take the lead in designing and building the new BI foundation. This includes:

• assessing our source systems, existing Tableau environment and reporting needs;

• designing the target BI and data warehouse architecture;

• setting up Snowflake, Fivetran and a maintainable dbt structure;

• designing ingestion patterns for databases, events, APIs and SaaS platforms;

• translating raw data into reusable business entities, dimensions and metrics;

• establishing clear definitions for KPIs such as active customers, products, churn and recurring revenue;

• rebuilding the agreed operational, churn and revenue reporting on top of the new governed models;

• designing an AI-ready semantic layer;

• delivering a practical AI analytics and/or anomaly detection proof of concept;

• introducing standards for testing, documentation, data quality, lineage, security and monitoring;

• working side by side with our junior BI Specialist and actively transferring your knowledge.

At the end of the project, we want our internal team to understand not justwhathas been built, butwhyit was built that way.