Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead - Databricks 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 Data Infrastructure, our goal is to streamline Cardlytics 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 Data Infrastructure to ensure swift access to data. Our approach is designed to not only simplify the way teams interact with data but also to accelerate time-to-insight, enabling Cardlytics teams to harness the full potential of their data for impactful outcomes.

About the Position

Cardlytics is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead - Databricks Platform to join the team, reporting to the Director Cloud & Data Infrastructure.

We are looking for an experienced technical leader to own and evolve our Databricks environment end-to-end on AWS. In this role, you will make administrative, design, and tactical decisions that shape how Analysts, ML Engineers, and Business stakeholders interact with data at Cardlytics. You will combine deep Databricks expertise with the ability to lead a small team, define platform standards, and act as the primary technical partner for diverse user groups across the organization.

Responsibilities

Platform Administration: Own day-to-day administration of the Databricks environment on AWS, including workspace configuration, cluster policies, user and group management, access controls, and cost governance.

Architecture & Design: Design and evolve the Cardlytics Databricks architecture; establish reference architectures and standards for batch, streaming, and ML workloads.

Governance & Security: Drive adoption of Unity Catalog for centralized RBAC, column-level security, data lineage, and metadata management; implement and maintain security best practices including encryption and audit logging.

Performance & Reliability: Monitor platform health, define SLAs, and lead performance tuning for Spark jobs, Delta tables, and SQL warehouses; own incident response and root-cause analysis.

User Enablement: Serve as the primary technical partner for Analysts, ML Engineers, and Business users; develop self-service guides, onboarding materials, and best-practice documentation to reduce friction across all user groups.

Infrastructure as Code: Own the CI/CD strategy for Databricks deployments using Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Databricks