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Samba TV is a media intelligence company that aggregates consumer attention data across screens in real time, serving major global brands. The company is Series D funded (~$100M raised), pre-IPO, growing 30% YoY, and 18 years established. Platforms is being built out aggressively to support the company's shift from legacy to agentic AI product lines ahead of 2027.
In this role, you will own your department's roadmap—deciding where to invest, running technology evaluations, and making the case for strategic choices. You'll manage a small team day-to-day and remain hands-on, picking up help-desk-level tickets when needed. This is not a role where you stay a layer above the work.
The core challenge is stakeholder management: Platforms owns infrastructure that every product team depends on, so you'll field feedback from roughly 80 people with opinions about what's not working. Your job is to translate those complaints into a coherent roadmap and convince teams to adopt your solutions instead of building workarounds.
You'll be expected to be technically credible in architecture discussions—not architect-level depth, but enough to pass an architecture challenge and be a credible voice in technical rooms. You'll own roadmap decisions and technical calls, not just run standups.
Samba is specifically not looking for someone with 3–6 years of straight people-management experience. They prefer hiring someone technical who wants to grow into management, with startup, small-team, or adjacent-industry background over big-tech experience. Management training will be provided alongside the Talent team.
Key traits Samba evaluates: Determined yet Resilient, Naturally Curious, Low Ego, Self-aware, Results Oriented.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Technical credibility: must pass architecture challenge; not architect-level depth but must be credible in technical discussions
- AWS experience (company also uses on-premise data center and GCP)
- Kubernetes
- Terraform and Python
- Comfortable owning a roadmap and making technical calls
- Strong cross-team communication and persuasion skills
- Startup, small-team, or adjacent-industry background preferred over big-tech
- Ability to translate infrastructure complaints into roadmap decisions
- Comfortable being hands-on and picking up operational work
- Not seeking someone who needs a pre-built roadmap or who avoids hands-on work
- Not suitable if you get defensive when receiving critical feedback from stakeholders
