Senior Director - Data Platform and Cloud Services

Samba is a media intelligence company. We know what the world is watching, reading, and thinking about — in real time, at scale, across every screen. Our data exists with the consent of over a billion people, organized into the most complete picture of consumer attention ever built. The biggest brands in the world use that picture to make smarter decisions. We think it’s the most interesting data asset on the planet, because it’s the most culturally relevant.

What you’ll do: Strategic Leadership

Define and execute a transformative vision for our data platform architecture that scales to billions of daily events

Partner with CTO and engineering leadership to align platform strategy with business objectives

Drive adoption of next-generation technologies including vector databases and ML-powered analytics

Build strategic roadmaps that balance innovation with operational excellence

Technical Architecture

Lead the evolution from current state to a modern, cloud-native data platform with embedded ML/AI capabilities

Work with the team to deliver fault-tolerant, multi-region architectures supporting real-time and batch processing

Build and maintain the services, platforms, and frameworks enabling Samba’s data engineering teams

Architect embedding-based systems for content understanding, viewer similarity, and semantic search

Deliver infrastructure for vector storage, indexing, and retrieval at scale (billions of embeddings)

Champion best practices in data governance, security, and compliance (GDPR, CCPA)

Evaluate and implement emerging technologies (streaming architectures, lakehouse patterns, ML platforms)

ML/AI Infrastructure

Design platforms for embedding generation, storage, and serving at scale

Implement vector search capabilities for real-time recommendations and content discovery

Build infrastructure supporting multimodal embeddings (video, audio, text metadata)

Enable self-service ML capabilities for data scientists and analysts

Establish MLOps practices for embedding model lifecycle management

Team & Organizational Development

Build and mentor a world-class team of platform engineers, ML engineers, and architects

Foster a culture of innovation, experimentation, and continuous learning

Establish clear career paths and growth opportunities for team members

Drive cross-functional collaboration with data science, product, and engineering teams

Operational Excellence

Establish SLAs and monitoring frameworks for internal and external clients

Provide observability tools for Data Engineering and Data Science, including tools to enforce data quality

Lead vendor relationships and technology partnerships

Drive automation and self-service capabilities for internal customers

Who you are: 12+ years in data platform/infrastructure roles, with 5+ years in senior leadership

Proven track record of leading large-scale platform transformations

Experience building production embedding systems and vector databases

History of building and scaling teams of 20+ engineers

Deep expertise in modern data architectures (data mesh, lakehouse, streaming-first)

Proficiency with, Stream processing (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming), Modern data warehouses/lakes (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery), Workflow management (Airflow, etc), Container orchestration (Kubernetes, EKS/GKE), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation), ML platforms (MLflow, Kubeflow, SageMaker)

Exceptional communication skills to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences

Strategic thinking with ability to balance long-term vision with short-term deliverables

Strong business acumen to connect technical decisions with business outcomes

Track record of influencing without authority across organizational boundaries

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 related field

Samba 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.

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