Platforms Engineering Manager

Sambatv; Warszawa; On-site; PLN 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Samba is a media intelligence company seeking a frontline manager for the Sama Data Platform and Cloud team in Warsaw. You’ll own your department’s roadmap, decide where to invest, run technology face-offs, and defend the value of your builds.

You’ll manage day-to-day for a small team, while occasionally picking up a help-desk ticket when counts demand it. Expect significant cross-team influence and stakeholder engagement.

Qualifications

• Technical credibility to discuss architecture in meetings.

Responsibilities

• Own your department's roadmap and decide where to invest.
• Run technology face-offs and defend the case for your builds.
• Manage day-to-day for a small team and handle tickets when needed.
• Influence ~80 stakeholders across product teams.

Tools

AWS

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.

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.

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.

• 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