The Role
Lead Samba’s data platform and cloud services strategy, architecture, and transformation at massive scale. Build cloud-native, multi-region platforms supporting real-time and batch processing, embedding systems, vector search, self-service machine learning, MLOps, governance, observability, and data quality. Build and mentor a large engineering organization, establish operational standards, manage technology partnerships, and align platform investments with business goals.
Summary Generated by Built In
Samba connects the advertising industry. Today, a trillion dollars of media flows through platforms that don’t talk to each other, and each one measures its own results. We built the independent alternative: consented first-party data and AI that give the world’s biggest advertisers, publishers, and platforms one clear view across all of it.
The next era of advertising will run on AI agents, and those agents will need data they can trust. We’re building that foundation, and the agents that act on it. Join us and help build what the industry runs on.
You lead and transform Samba's data platform and cloud services architecture. This role is not about incremental improvements: it calls for someone who can lead and execute a leap forward in our data infrastructure capabilities, positioning Samba at the forefront of TV data analytics and AI-driven insights.
- Set the Vision: Define and execute a transformative vision for a data platform that scales to billions of daily events, partnering with the CTO and engineering leadership to align strategy with business objectives.
- Evolve the Architecture: Lead the evolution to a modern, cloud-native data platform with embedded ML and AI, delivering fault-tolerant, multi-region architectures for real-time and batch processing and evaluating emerging technologies.
- Build Platform Services: Build and maintain the services, platforms, and frameworks that enable Samba's data engineering teams, driving automation and self-service capabilities for internal customers.
- Architect Embedding Systems: Architect embedding-based systems for content understanding, viewer similarity, semantic search, and real-time recommendations, with infrastructure for multimodal embeddings and vector storage, indexing, and retrieval at billions of embeddings.
- Enable Self-Service ML: Enable self-service ML for data scientists and analysts, establish MLOps practices for the embedding model lifecycle, and champion best practices in data governance, security, and compliance (GDPR, CCPA).
- Build the Team: Build and mentor a world-class team of platform engineers, ML engineers, and architects, fostering innovation and continuous learning, establishing clear career paths, and driving cross-functional collaboration.
- Run Operations: Establish SLAs and monitoring for internal and external clients, provide observability and data quality tools for Data Engineering and Data Science, and lead vendor relationships and technology partnerships.
What You Bring
- 12+ years in data platform and infrastructure roles, with 5+ years in senior leadership, and a history of building and scaling teams of 20+ engineers.
- A proven track record of leading large-scale platform transformations and of influencing without authority across organizational boundaries.
- Experience building production embedding systems and vector databases, with deep expertise in modern data architectures (data mesh, lakehouse, streaming-first).
- Proficiency with stream processing (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming), modern data warehouses and lakes (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery), workflow management (Airflow), container orchestration (Kubernetes, EKS, GKE), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and ML platforms (MLflow, Kubeflow, SageMaker).
- Exceptional communication skills for explaining complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, strategic thinking that balances long-term vision with short-term deliverables, and strong business acumen connecting technical decisions to business outcomes.
- Knowledge of privacy-preserving analytics and clean room technologies, and contributions to open-source projects in ML infrastructure or vector search.
- An advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Samba is an equal opportunity employer.
Your personal information
We collect personal information directly from you when you apply. Where the law permits, we may also receive it from third parties, such as through background, employment, or reference checks. For details, see Samba’s Applicant Privacy Policy. For EU residents, Samba Inc. is the data controller.
Use of AI in hiring
We may use AI tools to help review applications, analyze resumes, or assess responses. These tools support our recruiting team. People make every hiring decision. To learn more about how we process your data, please reach out.
Skills Required
- 12+ years of experience in data platform and infrastructure roles
- 5+ years of experience in senior leadership
- Experience building and scaling teams of 20+ engineers
- Track record leading large-scale platform transformations
- Experience influencing without authority across organizational boundaries
- Experience building production embedding systems and vector databases
- Deep expertise in modern data architectures, including data mesh, lakehouse, and streaming-first architectures
- Proficiency with Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Airflow, Kubernetes, EKS, GKE, Terraform, CloudFormation, MLflow, Kubeflow, and SageMaker
- Exceptional communication skills and strategic business acumen
- Knowledge of privacy-preserving analytics and clean room technologies
- Contributions to open-source projects in ML infrastructure or vector search
- Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience
Am I A Good Fit?
Get Personalized Job Insights.
Our AI-powered fit analysis compares your resume with a job listing so you know if your skills & experience align.
Success! Refresh the page to see how your skills align with this role.
The Company
What We Do
Samba is a media-intelligence company that combines consented first-party viewership data from streaming, linear TV, the web, and video games with AI to map content, audiences, and outcomes. Its platform gives advertisers, publishers, and media platforms insight into audience behavior and supports campaign planning, targeting, measurement, and optimization across channels. Samba’s data and analytics help clients understand audiences and make marketing decisions.
.png)
