Capture & Harvesting Manager

Lever, Inc.; Warszawa; On-site; PLN 42,000 - 57,000; Full time

Job summary

Samba is seeking an experienced engineering manager for the Harvesting team. You will directly manage a small, distributed engineering group and shape technical decisions across multiple projects. The role requires hands-on design review and mentorship to drive delivery.

You will influence across cross-functional teams, champion AI automation initiatives, and ensure robust engineering practices in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading a small-to-mid-size engineering team (3–10).
• Able to review system designs and make calls without escalation.
• Skilled at mentoring and removing technical blockers.

Responsibilities

• Manage three remote engineers now, with growth toward a larger team.
• Mentor engineers directly and resolve technical disagreements early.
• Represent Harvesting in cross-team discussions and push AI automation efforts.

Skills

Engineering management

System design review

Mentoring engineers

Job description

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.

Harvesting sits in Core division that fuels everything else at Samba. The raw viewership and ad data other teams turn into reports, licensing products, and measurement.

It's not a new team or a green-field bet: the ads-harvesting pipeline came into Samba through a December 2018 acquisition and has been running, and growing, every year since. Today it operates across nine-plus countries - Australia, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil - and adds more as Samba expands.

Three products live here: Ads Harvesting, which pulls ads out of live TV streams and builds the commercial schedules behind Samba's Ad Exposure product; CloudR, which fingerprints what's playing on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO Max to know what people actually watched; and Logo Schedule, a new AI model that tracks brand-logo exposure on screen, still in alpha, with real market interest already.

None of this goes direct to advertisers; the team's customers are internal - data licensing, product - who take this raw data and build what eventually reaches companies like Google and Amazon.

What you'd actually do

Piotr just stepped up from this exact role into Director, taking on a second team now and a third soon - you're the direct replacement for what he used to do day to day.

• Manage three remote engineers, small enough today that you'll be reviewing real system designs and answering real technical questions yourself, not delegating them, and expected to grow toward a team of up to 10.
• That means mentoring engineers directly, unblocking design decisions, resolving technical disagreements before they become team friction, and representing Harvesting's interests when cross-team work with Content ID or product teams needs someone who can speak for it.
• You'll also weigh in on the recurring in-house-vs-vendor calls for harvesting operations market by market, and keep pushing the team's AI automation work forward.

What you need to already be good at

• Real engineering management experience - leading a team of roughly 3 to 10 people, not just senior IC work with a title change.
• Technical enough to be dangerous: you can review a system design, catch what's wrong with it, and make the call yourself when someone's stuck — not escalation.
• Comfortable mentoring engineers directly and handling technical conflict without it becoming a people problem.

Bonus points

Background in video, TV, or ad-tech data experience with high-volume streaming or content-fingerprinting systems hands-on exposure to applied AI/ML in production, not just research comfortable making in-house-vs-vendor build calls across markets

Not for you if

• You want to run standups and stay out of the technical weeds.
• You need fully remote - this team's policy on that is not up for discussion.
• You're looking to inherit a big, mature org. Our's three people today, growing slowly.
• You want a clean slate project to define from scratch - this system has been live, and profitable, since 2018. You're joining an engine that already runs, not designing one.

424 zł - 574 zł a year

Samba is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.We strive to empower connection with one another, reflect the communities we serve, and tackle meaningful projects that make a real impact.

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