Platforms Engineering Manager

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.  Jaya, our CTO, has nine people reporting straight to her in Platforms and zero managers underneath. That's the gap. Platforms is Samba's shared-services org - infra, cloud, and data platforms - built for the transformation the company's mid-way through: converting exciting semi-monolithic applications into completely new architecture supporting agentic solutions. Nobody else owns this. Every product team builds on what Platforms ships. Sneak peek: in the next six months this splits further. You'd start as frontline manager for the Sama Data Platform and Cloud team. Once Platforms hires its VP, the org resettles around two managers and two architects reporting in above you, across what's becoming a 16-18 person department. What you'd actually do

Own your department's roadmap - not execute someone else's. Decide where to invest, run technology face-offs, and make the case for why. You'd manage day-to-day for a small team now, and you need to be able to pick up a help-desk-level ticket yourself when it counts - this isn't a hire who stays a layer above the work.

The harder part is everyone outside your team. Platforms doesn't own a product, it owns the infrastructure every product team is forced to build on - so you'll hear from roughly 80 people with opinions about why it's not good enough, and you need to convince them to adopt what you're building instead of just absorbing the complaints.

What you need to already be good at

• Technical enough to pass our architecture challenge - we're not asking for architect-level depth, but you need to be credible in the room, not just managing it.

• AWS, but we also have our own data center, and GCP

• Kubernetes

• Terraform and Python

• Comfortable owning a roadmap and making technical calls, not just running standups.

• A real communicator - this job is cross-team persuasion as much as it is management.

We're specifically not looking for someone with 3-6 years of straight people-management experience. We'd rather hire someone technical who wants to grow into this - startup, small-team, or adjacent-industry background over big-tech-with-a-roadmap-already-built. We'll train you into the management side alongside Talent.

Bonus points

Background in a startup or small, fast-moving team · comfortable being the most senior technical voice in the room without being the most senior architect · experience translating "our infra sucks" complaints into an actual roadmap decision

Not for you if

• You want the roadmap handed to you - there isn't one yet, you're building it

• You need to be a "professional manager" who doesn't get hands-on. Our CTO own words: "we're too small to just have professional managers"

• You get defensive instead of curious when 80 people are telling you your infrastructure isn't working for them

How we judge you, and how it goes

Same five things every Samba hire is scored on: Determined yet Resilient, Naturally Curious, Low Ego, Self-aware, Results Oriented.

Why now Samba's Series C, ~$100M raised, pre-IPO, growing 30% YoY, 18 years in. Platforms is being built out aggressively right now to carry the company's shift from legacy to agentic AI product lines ahead of 2027.
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