Director, Data Services
Samba TV
San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Jul 1, 2025
Samba TV tracks streaming and broadcast video across the world with our proprietary data and technology. We are on a mission to fundamentally transform the viewing experience for everyone. Our data enables media companies to connect with audiences for new shows and movies, and enables advertisers to engage viewers and measure reach across all their devices. We have an amazing story with a unique perspective on culture formed by a global footprint of data and AI-driven insights.
The Director of Data Services will be a pivotal business and product leader responsible for the entire data lakehouse layer of Samba TV's platform, establishing it as the central, unified data foundation for all product offerings. This role is crucial for integrating and standardizing all Samba data and data policies, ensuring best-in-class data quality, accessibility, and implementation of governance. The Director will also spearhead the incorporation and strategic utilization of new data types, particularly embeddings, to unlock advanced analytics, enhance audience intelligence, and drive innovation across the Plan, Activate, Measure (PAM) framework. This leader will ensure Samba TV maintains its position as a leading data provider, empowering superior outcomes for internal teams and external customers.
Key Responsibilities:
Unified Data Lakehouse Strategy & Implementation:
- Oversee the strategic vision, development, and evolution of Samba's unified data lake/lakehouse architecture, serving as the shared foundation for all applications including Data Licensing, Audience, and Measurement.
- Drive the consolidation and normalization of diverse data sources, encompassing ACR, web data, content extraction data, and various third-party inputs, to ensure a single, growing dataset.
- Implement an abstract interface for data access, decoupling applications from underlying storage and enabling a unified view of all data assets for engineering teams, data scientists, and non-engineering users like Samba’s Measurement Science team.
- Align data architectures across existing disparate systems and cloud providers (e.g., AWS, GCP BigQuery, Databricks), transitioning to a modern, scalable, and future-ready data platform.
- Collaborate closely with product and engineering leaders for Data Licensing, Audience, Measurement, and Identity to ensure their specific data needs are met by the unified platform.
New Data Type Integration & Innovation:
- Drive the vectorization of all collected data (e.g., viewership behavior, contextual, web behaviors, demographics) to create a high-quality embedding space, enhancing conceptual insight generation and enabling more scalable, prompt-based audience definition.
- Define strategies for potential externalization of embedding capabilities as a service to partners, potentially allowing them to join their data with Samba's in a shared vector database, differentiating offerings.
- Partner with VP Data Strategy and Application Product Managers to prioritize and roadmap new data integrations and define processes for onboarding new data partners and data types into Samba’s core data set.
Data Standardization, Governance, and Quality:
- Establish and enforce company-wide data quality standards and implement automated validation processes across all data pipelines.
- Lead the adoption of Unity Catalog as the centralized policy store and data discovery platform.
- Ensure data reliability, accuracy, and completeness by improving data ingestion, processing, and management processes, addressing issues like outdated processing and gaps in coverage.
- Streamline internal data processes to eliminate data silos and inconsistencies that currently hinder multi-product integrations and overall efficiency.
- Collaborate with the Governance team to ensure all data policies are implemented, and processes exist for integrating new data sets in accordance with policies and contracts.
- Continuously optimize server costs and capacity for data storage and processing, particularly with global expansion and increased data volumes.
Qualifications:
- 8+ years of experience in data platform management, data architecture, or a related leadership role, ideally within AdTech, MarTech, or a data-intensive technology company.
- Deep expertise in data lakehouse architectures (e.g., Databricks), data catalogs, and data orchestration tools (e.g., Apache Airflow).
- Proven experience with AI/ML-driven data initiatives, particularly with embeddings, vector databases, and natural language processing.
- Strong understanding of data governance, quality frameworks, and privacy compliance (GDPR, CCPA).
- Demonstrated ability to lead complex cross-functional initiatives involving engineering, data science, product, and business teams.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, capable of translating complex technical concepts into strategic business implications for executive leadership.
- Experience with identity resolution methodologies and cross-screen data integration is highly desirable.
- Ability to balance strategic long-term vision with immediate operational needs and drive efficient, scalable solutions.
Samba TV 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 TV may collect personal information directly from you, as a job applicant, Samba TV 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.