Big Shot Pictures · 11 hours ago
Lead Engineer
Los Angeles, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Lead/Staff
8+ years expBig Shot Pictures is a next generation animation company that produces global animation franchises across various platforms. The Lead Engineer will oversee the design, development, and operation of internal platforms and tooling that support the company's YouTube-first content engine, ensuring reliability, scalability, and flexibility of the studio's tools.
Entertainment
Responsibilities
Design, own, and evolve the technical architecture for the studio's internal platforms, tools, and services
Establish engineering standards, best practices, and technical direction across the engineering team
Balance rapid iteration with long-term system health, reliability, and extensibility
Lead and mentor engineers as the team grows, establishing a culture of ownership, speed, and craftsmanship
Drive projects from concept through production, ensuring systems ship and deliver measurable workflow impact
Remain hands-on where needed, particularly in early stages or for high-impact initiatives
Lead design and development for the studio's internal tool suite - including, but not limited to…
Content recommendation engine (powered by machine learning)
Production operations (clip search, automated assembly, LoRA training, etc)
Gen-AI animation product development leveraging third party LLMs and tools
Non-production operations (livestreaming, thumbnail generation, workflow orchestration, etc)
Create operational controls for studio tooling (admin consoles, runbooks, self-serve troubleshooting) so teams can run workflows without engineering intervention
Implement automation and orchestration to standardize high-volume workflows and eliminate repeat manual steps
Partner closely with Product and Operations to build technical solutions that automate and streamline real-world workflows
Provide technical guidance during build-vs-buy decisions and oversee vendor integrations
Act as a technical thought partner to leadership on roadmap planning and future capabilities
Own infrastructure decisions across cloud services, deployment strategies, and monitoring
Ensure systems are reliable, observable, and resilient under production load
Design systems with security, permissions, and multi-user access in mind
Continuously optimize for system performance and cost efficiency
Qualification
Required
8+ years of software engineering experience, including leadership of engineers and/or managers, with ownership of delivery across multiple workstreams
Strong systems background building high-availability, production-grade distributed services, with sound architectural judgment and a focus on reliability and scalability
Proficiency with modern cloud environments (AWS/GCP or equivalent) and operational excellence (monitoring/observability, incident response, performance/cost tradeoffs)
Demonstrated strength in engineering craft: design reviews, code quality, pragmatic process, and raising the bar across teams
Proven ability to hire, mentor, and grow engineers and leaders; builds strong team culture and clarity of execution
Familiarity with streaming/video fundamentals (protocols/codecs/players/CDN concepts) or adjacent media engineering experience
Experience building internal tools for non-technical teams (production, creative, ops), with a strong “users-first” mindset
Led AI/ML systems end-to-end, including managing ML engineers and owning model quality, reliability, and lifecycle
Strong communication skills and a collaborative mindset; able to work effectively with non-technical stakeholders in a fast-moving environment
Company
Big Shot Pictures
11-50 employeesFunding
Current Stage
Early StageCompany data provided by crunchbase