Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead - Platform

About Cardlytics Founded in 2008, Cardlytics (NASDAQ: CDLX) is the industry-leading purchase intelligence and incentives platform. We make commerce smarter and more rewarding for everyone by helping businesses attract, understand, and incentivize consumers through our partners' digital reward programs. Join us on our mission to make commerce smarter and more rewarding for everyone! About the Team At Cardlytics, our goal is to streamline data consumption across the entire organization. We understand that accessible, reliable data underpins informed decision-making and innovative problem-solving. By partnering closely with product and engineering teams, we tailor our solutions to fit their specific workflow needs and make strategic investments in our platform to ensure swift access to data. Our approach is designed to simplify the way teams interact with data, to accelerate time-to-insight to enable Cardlytics teams to harness the full potential of their data for impactful outcomes, and to make deliberate technology choices that keep our data infrastructure cost-effective. About the Position Cardlytics is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead - Platform to join the team, reporting to the VP of Engineering, Cloud & Data Infrastructure. We are looking for an experienced technical leader to own and evolve our data compute environment end-to-end on AWS, including defining the next-generation platform direction. In this role, you will make architectural, design, and operational decisions that shape how analysts, engineers, and business stakeholders interact with data at Cardlytics. As data consumption increasingly shifts toward AI and agentic applications, you will also shape the platform's evolution into an AI-ready foundation — spanning the semantic layer, feature store, and data ontology that these systems depend on. You will combine deep expertise in industry-leading data platforms with the ability to provide technical leadership, define platform standards, and act as the primary technical partner for diverse user groups across the organization. You will: Architecture and design : Design and evolve the Cardlytics next-generation architecture; establish reference architectures and standards for batch, streaming, ML, and AI/agentic workloads. AI-ready data platform : Build out the semantic layer, feature store, and data ontology that make Cardlytics data consumable by AI/agentic applications; enable governed, self-service access for both human and machine (LLM/agent) consumers. User enablement : Serve as the primary technical partner for analysts, engineers, and business users; develop self-service guides, onboarding materials, and best-practice documentation to reduce friction across all user groups. Technical leadership : Set technical direction for the platform and mentor engineers across the data and platform teams; drive engineering excellence and best practices, and manage the vendor relationship. …