Senior Software Engineer - Identity

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 join the Identity team in Amsterdam, which builds and operates the core systems behind Samba's cross-device identity resolution, data onboarding, and distribution, the foundational layer connecting data to advertisers, agencies, data partners, and internal product teams. You architect and deliver large-scale, cloud-native data engineering systems and operate as a technical authority, setting direction and shaping how Identity systems evolve.

What You'll Do

• Build Identity Pipelines: Design, build, and operate large-scale data pipelines for ingesting, transforming, and distributing identity-linked data, architecting ETL and ELT workflows on cloud infrastructure with strong reliability, accuracy, and observability.
• Design Platform Services: Design and build API-first, platform-grade services that expose Identity capabilities as self-service building blocks, with clear contracts, strong reliability, and ease of integration.
• Own Core Identity Systems: Own the technical evolution of Identity's core systems, including probabilistic and deterministic matching, device graph construction, and audience segmentation, driving their reliability, scalability, and long-term direction.
• Build Secure Collaboration: Architect secure data collaboration capabilities, including clean room workflows and privacy-preserving computation, embedding privacy by design with deep application of GDPR, CCPA, and Samba's data governance policies.
• Set Technical Direction: Set the technical direction for how Identity systems serve downstream use cases, write decision-driven design documents, and partner with the Engineering Manager and cross-functional leads on roadmap and risk.
• Own Reliability: Own end-to-end reliability, lead incident response and post-mortem actions, define and improve SLAs, SLOs, and operational metrics, and drive performance, cloud cost efficiency, and CI/CD and testing maturity.
• Lead and Mentor: Lead code and design reviews, champion high standards for code quality, testability, and maintainability, and mentor engineers on the Identity team through structured feedback, pairing, and design review.

What You Bring

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in data engineering, backend systems, or distributed data infrastructure, and proven ability to own technical architecture end-to-end in a complex production data environment.
• Strong command of Python and SQL, comfortable with JavaScript in full-stack or API contexts, and extensive hands-on experience with distributed processing frameworks (such as Spark and Databricks) on large-scale production datasets.
• Solid experience with cloud platforms (AWS and/or GCP) and their core data services, workflow orchestration tools (Apache Airflow, dbt, Prefect, or equivalent), and data warehousing and lakehouse architectures, including Snowflake.
• Experience building platform-grade, API-first systems that enable self-service for internal teams or external clients.
• Deep understanding of data privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA) with practical experience building privacy-compliant systems that handle personally identifiable information (PII) at scale, and familiarity with secure data collaboration, data clean rooms, and privacy-preserving computation.
• An exceptional communicator and cross-functional collaborator who writes sharp technical designs and drives alignment in ambiguous situations, and a genuine mentor and coach who gives direct feedback and raises the bar for the team.
• Preferred: experience in adtech, identity resolution, data licensing, or digital media; streaming frameworks (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming); AI and machine learning in production data workflows; and cross-team technical leadership (architecture, standards, mentorship programs).

Samba is an equal opportunity employer.

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