2005–2012 After leaving school, Wylie moved to
Ottawa, where he began volunteering for "a short stint" in the parliamentary office of his Member of Parliament,
Keith Martin. The following year, he got a job as a contractor in the office of the Canadian opposition leader,
Michael Ignatieff, at the age of 19. During his contract, Wylie begun developing strategies on how to capitalize data harvested through
social media for political gain. The party officials did not renew Wylie's contract in 2009, and a senior insider said it was largely because his ideas were seen as "too invasive." Of Wylie, the colleague said, "Let's say he had boundary issues on data even back then. He effectively pitched an earlier version of [the
Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting operation] to us back in 2009 and we said, 'No.'" In 2008, he volunteered on
the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, learning about
microtargeting from Obama campaign adviser Ken Strasma. There has been some dispute over whether his volunteer role was a senior or a junior-level data entry role. In 2012, Wylie worked for the
Liberal Democrats in the UK on voter targeting.
SCL Elections and Cambridge Analytica, 2013–14 In 2013, Wylie discovered some research on
psychological profiling using social data funded by
DARPA His role at Cambridge Analytica was reported by the
Parliament of the United Kingdom as its "director of research" and by
Time as a "founder," Wylie's role at SCL was first revealed in May 2017 by
The Observer journalist
Carole Cadwalladr, who wrote that "He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualised political messages] to Cambridge Analytica". He said that traditional analytics around voter profiling used voting records and purchase histories to predict voter behavior, but that it was useless for learning if a voter was "a neurotic introvert, a religious extrovert, a fair-minded liberal or a fan of the occult," which were among the traits Wylie and his team determined were uniquely susceptible to political messaging. Wylie found research done at
Cambridge University which mapped
Facebook likes to personality traits, research that was done by paying users to take a quiz and download an app that scraped private information from the profiles of the participants and their friends. Academic
Aleksandr Kogan was commissioned by Wylie's team to build a similar application, Facebook denied any knowledge of Kogan's program, citing that he had said he was "collecting information for academic purposes," and agreed that it would not be used for "commercial purposes." Kogan declined to comment on the matter, citing
Non-disclosure agreements with both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, beyond the statements that his application was "a very standard vanilla Facebook app," Prior to his departure, Wylie had shared his profiling tool with
Robert Mercer, the billionaire who funded Cambridge Analytica and later became one of
Donald Trump's mega-donors, and with
Steve Bannon, who effectively ran the company from 2014 onward and later went on to become Trump's campaign manager. Wylie's research work included message-testing work for
Steve Bannon on
building a wall on the American-Mexican border. He later recounted, "My ears perked up when I [later] started hearing some of these things like 'drain the swamp' or 'build the wall' or 'the deep state' because these were all narratives that had come out from the research that we were doing," and that the wall "is not really about stopping immigrants. It's to embody separation. If you can embody that separation and you can further distance in the minds of Americans us here in America and them elsewhere, even if it is just across a river, or just across a desert, then you have won that culture war." Wylie has said he did not realize the "potential misuse" of his research at the time, referring to it as his "real failure," along with former SCL/Cambridge Analytica senior staff Brent Clickard, Mark Gettleson and Tadas Jucikas. In December 2014, Wylie registered Eunoia Technologies Inc in the
tax haven of
Delaware. In May 2015, a wholly owned UK subsidiary of Eunoia was registered in the UK as Eunoia Technologies Ltd. and the company offered election-related consultancy services including "psychographic microtargeting", "multi-agent system voter behaviour simulation", and "data & communications management". and that unlike SCL/Cambridge Analytica, Wylie's company had been the only organization Kogan granted complete access to the dataset. During the Easter of 2015, two of Wylie's Eunoia colleagues who had joined him from SCL, Tadas Jucikas and Mark Gettleson, flew to
New York to meet
Donald Trump's then-campaign manager on
his 2016 presidential bid,
Corey Lewandowski, for a meeting in a
Central Park hotel. They pitched for Eunoia to work on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, but were ultimately unsuccessful. The approach to the Trump campaign was made with Wylie's knowledge as CEO of Eunoia, and reportedly had his blessing. In November 2015, Eunoia Technologies pitched Facebook data-mining techniques to the Liberal Party of Canada, securing a $100,000 contract in January 2016 for "a short-lived pilot project" with the
Liberal Caucus Research Bureau. However, the contract was not renewed beyond the pilot. From 2015, Wylie and Gettleson became embroiled in litigation with SCL, alleging that Eunoia had infringed SCL's intellectual property, had misappropriated SCL's data, had attempted to 'poach' other SCL contractors, and had attempted to 'poach' SCL's clients. SCL later claimed that Eunoia had been "the subject of restraining undertakings to prevent the misuse of the company's intellectual property". A QC's report noted: ::
"On 21 May 2015, SCL discovered that Eunoia Technologies Limited had approached at least one of SCL’s existing clients in the USA, following confirmation from a US political client that they had received a proposal from Eunoia Technologies, which purported to deliver exactly the same services as SCL. Consequently, SCL’s lawyers wrote to Wylie and others at Eunoia Technologies Limited regarding suspected breaches of covenants on intellectual property, client solicitation, staff solicitation and non-competition." 2018–present On 1 December 2018, Wylie was hired by
H&M as its consulting director of research, eventually being promoted to its head of insight and emerging technologies. ==EU Referendum campaign==