Capture & Harvesting Manager

Sambatv; Warszawa; On-site; PLN 300,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

Samba is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager for the Harvesting team within the Core division. You will lead a small, remote-first group of engineers and guide the evolution of the live harvesting pipeline, CloudR, and Logo Schedule.

You will mentor engineers directly, review designs, resolve technical conflicts, and push AI automation across markets while aligning with data licensing and product teams.

Qualifications

• Minimum real engineering management experience.
• Ability to review a system design and make decisions.
• Experience mentoring engineers directly.

Responsibilities

• Manage three remote engineers, with growth planned toward a team of up to 10.
• Mentor engineers directly, unblock design decisions, resolve technical disagreements.
• Represent Harvesting's interests in cross-team work with Product/Content ID and other teams; push AI automation across markets.

Skills

People leadership

System design

Mentoring

Cross-team collaboration

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.

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

• 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 elevate it.

• 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.

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.

Samba may collect personal information directly from you, as a job applicant, Samba may also receive personal information from third parties, for example, in connection with a background, employment or reference check, in accordance with the applicable law. For further details, please see Samba's Applicant Privacy Policy. For residents of the EU , Samba Inc. is the data controller.