The Role
Lead the Identity team, manage engineers, drive technical direction, and ensure delivery of identity products while adhering to privacy regulations.
Summary Generated by Built In
Samba TV tracks streaming and broadcast video across the world with our proprietary data and technology. We are on a mission to fundamentally transform the viewing experience for everyone. Our data enables media companies to connect with audiences for new shows and movies, and enables advertisers to engage viewers and measure reach across all their devices. We have an amazing story with a unique perspective on culture formed by a global footprint of data and AI-driven insights.
We are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead our Identity team — the backbone of Samba is cross-device identity resolution and data onboarding capabilities. Reporting to the Sr. Director of Engineering, you will manage a team of talented engineers building and operating the systems that power identity resolution, data ingestion, and distribution across Samba's platform and partner ecosystem.
This is a high-impact role focused on execution and delivery at the intersection of privacy, data infrastructure, and advertising technology. You will be responsible for driving the execution and delivery of identity products that serve advertisers, agencies, and data partners globally, working closely with Tech Leads and senior engineers on technical direction.
What You'll Do
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and engineering excellence
- Manage hiring, performance reviews, and career development for team members across levels
- Foster a psychologically safe environment where engineers can do their best work, learn from mistakes, and grow their careers.
- Establish clear goals, expectations, and execution cadence, including planning, delivery tracking, follow-through, and team rituals (standups, retrospectives, and 1:1s) to keep the team aligned and high-performing
- Own the end-to-end technical roadmap for Samba TV's identity resolution and data ingestion/distribution systems
- Participate in architectural discussions and ensure architectural decisions are well executed and aligned with engineering standards, scalability requirements, and data privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA).
- Partner closely with Product Management to translate business requirements into technical designs and delivery plans
- Actively drive the software development lifecycle from design and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and maintenance, ensuring timely and high-quality delivery.
- Champion engineering best practices, including code reviews, documentation, testing, observability, CI/CD, and effective use of AI-assisted development tools.
- Collaborate with Data Science and Platform Engineering teams to ensure identity systems are integrated, scalable, and well-governed
- Work with the Senior Director, Product Management – Data Products & Identity Portfolio to shape the long-term product vision and execution
- Engage with Business Development and Commercial teams to support partner integrations.
- Serve as a key technical voice with senior leadership, communicating roadmap progress, risks, and opportunities clearly
- Manage team resources, project timelines, and deliverables to ensure predictable, high-quality outcomes
- Drive the adoption of operational best practices: incident management, SLAs, on-call rotations, and post-mortems
- Monitor and continuously improve system performance, reliability, and cost efficiency
Who You Are
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 2-4 years in engineering management or a team lead role
- Proven track record of building, growing, and developing high-performing engineering teams
- Strong foundations in software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and writing production-quality code
- Experience working with large datasets and data-centric systems, including designing, querying, and evolving data models over time.
- Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) and modern data infrastructure (Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Snowflake)
- Deep technical background in cloud-native, data-heavy systems, including data pipelines and API-first architectures.
- Strong understanding of data privacy principles and regulations (GDPR, CCPA) and their practical engineering implications
- Demonstrated ability to partner effectively with Product, Data Science, and commercial stakeholders in a matrixed organization
- Excellent communication skills — able to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to non-technical audiences
- Comfortable operating with ambiguity and making data-driven decisions in a fast-paced environment
- Prior hands-on experience in machine learning engineering or working closely with ML-driven systems.
- Background in managing systems that handle PII at scale with strong data governance practices
- Experience in ad tech, identity resolution, data licensing, or a closely related domain
Preferred Experience
#LI-WD1
Base salary is just one component of Samba TV’s total compensation package for employees. Other rewards may include bonuses, short-term incentives, and long-term incentives. In addition, Samba provides health insurance, wellness offerings, life and disability insurance, a retirement savings plan, paid holidays and paid time off (PTO), and other employee benefits.
Samba TV is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We strive to empower connection with one another, reflect the communities we serve, and tackle meaningful projects that make a real impact.
Samba TV may collect personal information directly from you, as a job applicant, Samba TV may also receive personal information from third parties, for example, in connection with a background, employment or reference check, in accordance with the applicable law. For further details, please see Samba's Applicant Privacy Policy. For residents of the EU , Samba Inc. is the data controller.
Top Skills
AWS
Databricks
GCP
Kafka
Snowflake
Spark
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The Company
What We Do
Television remains a vibrant cultural influence and an essential source of entertainment and information worldwide. Tremendous growth in content choices, and viewing platforms that allow us to watch anything, anytime, on any screen, has actually made it harder for viewers to discover and keep up with all the great programming available. It’s also more competitive for content providers to keep your attention, and for marketers to make strong, measurable connections with their target consumers. Technology that improves the viewing experience, enables content discovery, and addresses audience fragmentation across screens will strengthen television’s business model and relevance to consumers. Data is at the center of any solution to make TV better. Samba TV's technology is built into Smart TVs and easily maps to smart phones and tablets. By recognizing what's on screen, Samba TV learns what viewers like and using machine learning algorithms, enables discovery of shows and actors in a whole new way. Likewise, our data and measurement products are transforming the way stakeholders across the media landscape are thinking about their business. Given the dramatic growth in streaming services, connected devices, time-shifting, and multi-screen viewership, our data products solve real problems and create a meaningful competitive advantage for our clients.
