Tech Lead, Platform Data Infra & AI-Ready Lakehouse

Cardlytics; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible paid time off

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Educational assistance

Lifestyle Spending Account

Calm app subscription

Job summary

Cardlytics is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead - Platform to own and evolve the data compute environment on AWS. You will shape the platform for AI-ready workloads and act as the primary technical partner for multiple user groups.

The role requires leading architecture, governance, and incident response with a strong emphasis on scalable data infrastructure. You will mentor engineers, define platform standards, and drive performance, security, and cost governance across the

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering or data platform roles.
• 2+ years in a technical lead or architecture capacity.
• Experience designing Lakehouse architectures and large-scale ELT/ETL pipelines.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve Cardlytics' next-generation architecture for batch, streaming, ML, and AI/agent workloads.
• Build out the semantic layer, feature store, and data ontology to enable AI-ready data access.
• Serve as the primary technical partner for analysts, engineers, and business users; create self-service guides and docs.
• Set technical direction for the platform and mentor engineers across data and platform teams.
• Define monitoring standards and SLAs; lead performance tuning for Spark jobs and data formats; manage incident response.
• Drive governance with a unified layer (e.g., Unity Catalog) for central RBAC, data lineage, and security practices.
• Define operating model and guardrails for managed lakehouse platforms on AWS; enforce DevOps practices across teams.
• Own CI/CD strategy for lakehouse deployments (Terraform, GitHub Actions); promote best practices across engineering.

Skills

Data engineering

Technical leadership

Architecture

Cloud platforms

Databricks

Spark/PySpark

SQL

Tools

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Delta Lake

Unity Catalog

Spark

Job description

Cardlytics is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead - Platform to own and evolve the data compute environment on AWS. You will shape the platform for AI-ready workloads and act as the primary technical partner for multiple user groups.

The role requires leading architecture, governance, and incident response with a strong emphasis on scalable data infrastructure. You will mentor engineers, define platform standards, and drive performance, security, and cost governance across the