Senior Engineering Manager - Data Delivery

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.

About the Role

You lead the Samba Data Delivery team, a dual-discipline engineering organization spanning a frontend platform team and a data delivery team, both in active, high-impact phases of platform evolution. Reporting to the Senior Director of Engineering, you operate as a second-line manager, leading Engineering Managers and senior individual contributors, driving strategy across multiple work streams, and accountable for outcomes with meaningful impact on the broader business.

What You'll Do

• Lead Managers and Engineers: Lead, mentor, and grow Engineering Managers and senior engineers across both teams, owning hiring, performance, and career development, and setting goals, rituals, and cadences for a distributed organization.
• Shape Strategy and Planning: Develop organizational priorities, workforce plans, and department objectives with senior leadership, and set the technical direction and roadmap for both teams, guiding architectural evolution so each platform scales reliably.
• Guide the Frontend Platform: Guide the frontend platform team as owner of the unified internal UI platform, holding the bar on platform integrity, shared component quality, and developer experience for teams building on it.
• Drive Data Delivery Architecture: Drive data delivery architecture through a major re-architecture toward a lightweight, extensible pipeline model, and own pipeline reliability, data quality, service level agreement (SLA) management, and the API layer.
• Oversee Full-Stack Delivery: Oversee full-stack delivery across React frontends, REST API design, and backend data processing with clean contracts between layers, and champion best practices in observability, CI/CD, incident management, and testing.
• Own Operations and Budget: Drive predictable delivery across concurrent workstreams while owning operational reliability (on-call, incident response, post-mortems, PagerDuty SLAs), reducing operational load over time, and owning the department budget, including Databricks compute optimization.
• Partner and Represent: Partner with Product Management, Data Science, Platform Engineering, and commercial teams on roadmaps and integrations, and serve as the primary technical voice for Data Delivery with senior leadership.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years in engineering management, including proven experience as a second-line manager leading Engineering Managers across multiple teams.
• Strong command of full-stack system design, API design and maintenance (REST, GraphQL, or equivalent), and clean backend-to-frontend contracts.
• Technical credibility in both frontend platform engineering (component architecture, design systems, micro-frontend patterns) and large-scale data infrastructure (PySpark and Spark on Databricks, Airflow, AWS), able to engage engineers on each side.
• Experience managing teams with high operational and keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) load alongside active delivery, protecting delivery capacity, making operational work visible, and driving improvements that reduce toil.
• Proven ability to set and enforce engineering standards (CI/CD maturity, observability and alerting with tools like Sentry, Prometheus, and PagerDuty, data quality, testing), establish departmental operational objectives, and be accountable for production systems and SLAs.
• An exceptional mentor and coach who develops managers and senior engineers and builds strong feedback cultures, and an outstanding communicator who can translate complex technical decisions for senior leadership and align diverse stakeholders.
• Preferred: adtech, data licensing, or media technology experience; internal tooling platforms; FinOps and cloud cost optimization on Databricks or Spark; GDPR and CCPA familiarity; and managing distributed teams across time zones.

Samba is an equal opportunity employer.

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