Senior Engineering Manager

About Samsung Food

At Samsung Food, we’re trying to build a more sustainable future by inspiring home cooks everywhere to tackle holistic health through nutrition and reduce food waste. We’re a fully-owned, independently-operated Samsung subsidiary (acquired in 2019) primed to grow on top of Samsung’s global resources and hardware ecosystem. We are passionate about what we build and who we build for within one of the world’s largest corporations to bring our highly-rated native app experiences to tens of millions of TVs, wearables, and kitchen appliances in the years to come.

We’re a remote-first, globally distributed team of 100+ people based across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and everywhere in between. We’ve been fully distributed since 2016 and pioneered many of the practices which are commonplace in remote workplaces today.

Learn more about how we build a team who works together.

About the Role

The Senior Engineering Manager for the Food Intelligence stream will lead Whisk's most strategic technical domain - responsible for advancing our food data technology, managing high-impact ML innovation, and building foundational backend systems. This manager will combine deep technical insight with strong management capabilities to guide a team delivering internal food tech services to multiple stakeholders, while also shaping the future of food intelligence through cutting-edge innovation.

Responsibilities

Strategy & Innovation

• Define and evolve the technical strategy for food intelligence in collaboration with the Head of Engineering and Head of Core Product.
• Encourage innovation across our data ontology (core IP), homegrown ML models (NLP, recommender systems, VisionAI), adaptation and fine tuning of open-source models, and food-tech services.
• Work closely with Food Graph and Wellness data teams to drive ontology and semantic data innovations.

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead a multidisciplinary team:
  • ML team, reporting to an ML manager (NLP, recommendations, computer vision)
  • Backend engineers (building shared APIs, services, and systems)
  • Console team (internal tooling and platforms) - sits under the ML team manager
• Provide clear direction, performance management, and career growth support for engineers and team leads.
• Establish a culture of an autonomous, high-performing stream that delivers value reliably and independently.

Stakeholder Collaboration & Delivery

• Collaborate with:
  • Senior and technical PMs to prioritize innovations vs. stakeholder-driven needs.
  • Food Services stream and other streams using Food Intelligence APIs and ontology services.
  • Samsung Health and other external partners to support integration and roadmap alignment.
  • Navigate and resolve conflicting priorities across multiple internal (Whisk) and external (Samsung) stakeholders.
  • Translate technical opportunities into business value, and ensure clear alignment across delivery cycles.
    

Execution & Operational Excellence

• Ensure the stream delivers robust, performant APIs and services that support the entire platform.
• Establish strong engineering standards, delivery cadence, testing rigor, and technical documentation.
• Own resourcing, platform release planning, and cross-team process collaboration. Define collaboration with Release Manager.

Leadership & Influence

• Serve as a member of the Samsung Food Brain Trust, contributing to company-wide technical and product direction, representing the Food Intelligence stream in executive and leadership forums.
• Work with senior Samsung stakeholders to influence product integration and technical alignment, especially in food, nutrition and health-related use cases.

Technical Environment

• Backend stack: Primarily Scala, but candidates need not have prior Scala experience.
• Expectation is fluency in leading teams building and maintaining APIs, services, and platforms used by multiple stakeholders.
• ML environment includes homegrown models, trained and served internally; requires experience managing applied ML at scale, not necessarily direct ML modeling.
  
  

Success Indicators

• Food Intelligence services are trusted, performant, and broadly adopted across stakeholders.
• The team delivers a regular cadence of innovations and upgrades to our ontology and ML platforms.
• Stakeholders like Food Services and Samsung Health experience timely, prioritized delivery.
• Engineers feel empowered and clear on purpose, with strong retention and satisfaction.
• The role is seen as a strategic technical leader within the company.

Requirements

Core Experience

• 10+ years in software engineering, with 5-10 years of engineering management experience which includes 2-4 years of senior engineering management experience.
  
• Proven track record of managing multi-functional technical teams, including backend or ML teams.
• Experience leading teams that own APIs and backend services used by multiple internal or external consumers.
• Strong history of delivering platform-level infrastructure or reusable services in a fast-paced product organization.

Technical Leadership

• Ability to challenge, review, and guide architecture and design decisions, even if not hands-on.
• Familiarity with managing software delivery in a distributed system environment (microservices, API contracts, observability).
• Comfort working in data-rich or ontology-heavy domains (e.g., knowledge graphs, taxonomies, classification systems) is a strong plus.

Cross-Functional & Stakeholder Management

• Demonstrated success working with senior product managers and technical PMs to define priorities and trade-offs.
• Experience balancing innovative R&D efforts with delivery for stakeholder-driven product requirements.
• Ability to navigate competing demands, manage scope, and align stakeholders toward strategic outcomes.
• Strong communication and relationship-building skills across engineering, product, data, and external partners.
  

Strategic Thinking & Execution

• Able to set and communicate vision for a tech-focused stream, combining innovation with operational reliability.
• Comfortable working closely with company leadership and acting as a thought partner in shaping technical strategy.
• Experience defining and tracking team-level and org-level metrics/KPIs.

Collaborative Mindset & Adaptability

• Experience collaborating with partner organizations, ideally navigating different levels of technical maturity or development culture.
• Flexible and pragmatic - able to shift between hands-on technical alignment and higher-level planning.
• Comfortable working in globally distributed teams across time zones and cultures.

Bonus Experience (Nice to Have)

• Prior exposure to Scala or functional programming is a plus, but not required.
• Familiarity with regulated domains (e.g., health tech, privacy-aware development) or machine learning productization.

Location

Fully Remote: Work from anywhere with flexibility, though overlap with GMT time-zones is ideal.

What We Offer

• Contract-based, full-time role (40 hours/week, depending on workload) with a long-term commitment.
• 100% remote work.
• Join a supportive and dynamic team. In 2024, Samsung Food was recognized as a Most Loved Workplace® by the Best Practice Institute (BPI) for our outstanding team culture.
  
  
  

Please include your hourly rate (in USD) when applying for this position.