Senior Director

Salary Range: 185000 to 200000 (Currency: USD) (Pay period: per-year-salary)

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
• Design 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
• Build 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

Required Qualifications

• 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
• Experience with TV/media analytics, AdTech, or similar high-volume data environments
• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in TV/video analytics or advertising technology
• Background in content recommendation systems using embeddings
• Knowledge of privacy-preserving analytics and clean room technologies
• Contributions to open-source projects in ML infrastructure or vector search
• Experience with real-time bidding or programmatic advertising infrastructure
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field