Principal Architect, Scalable Data Platforms

Samba; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 230,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Wellness offerings

Life and disability insurance

Retirement savings plan

Paid holidays and PTO

Other employee benefits

Job summary

Samba TV is seeking a Principal Engineer to own architecture and system design across our Audiences and Measurement product lines in Austin. You will drive shared data models, pipelines, and a unified approach to ingest, process, and activate viewership data at scale.

You will mentor senior engineers, align architecture across teams, and partner with product, data science, and go-to-market to deliver high-impact outcomes. Strong design rigor and ambiguity tolerance are essential.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience architecting large-scale, data-intensive systems (streaming/batch pipelines, distributed data stores, or audience/measurement platforms).
• A track record of technical leadership at scale without direct reports — driving alignment across teams through influence and design rigor.
• Strong system design fundamentals: data modeling, distributed systems tradeoffs, scalability and reliability patterns.
• Strong cross-functional communication skills, with experience partnering across product, data science, and multiple engineering teams.
• Comfortable operating with significant ambiguity and defining technical direction where none currently exists.

Responsibilities

• Set architectural direction and technical standards across measurement and audience systems, ensuring they scale reliably and remain extensible as new data sources and products come online
• Lead system design for high-impact, cross-team initiatives, balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform health
• Drive architectural convergence between audiences/segments and measurement so they function as one cohesive system
• Help define our technical approach to data clean room integrations, as measurement partnerships increasingly require privacy-safe data collaboration
• Act as a technical thought partner to engineering leadership, raising the bar on design rigor, code quality, and operational excellence
• Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, and drive alignment on architecture across teams that own adjacent parts of the measurement/audiences stack
• Identify and de-risk technical debt, scalability bottlenecks, and single points of failure before they become organizational blockers

Skills

Architect large-scale data systems

Technical leadership without direct\n

System design fundamentals

Cross-functional collaboration

Ambiguity-driven direction

Job description

Samba TV is seeking a Principal Engineer to own architecture and system design across our Audiences and Measurement product lines in Austin. You will drive shared data models, pipelines, and a unified approach to ingest, process, and activate viewership data at scale.

You will mentor senior engineers, align architecture across teams, and partner with product, data science, and go-to-market to deliver high-impact outcomes. Strong design rigor and ambiguity tolerance are essential.