Technical Director, Media & Entertainment AI Infrastructure

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California, +1 more state.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the Technical Blueprint: Personally design the infrastructure solutions for our key M&E partnerships, studio-scale content production pipelines, agency data consolidation initiatives, and generative AI model deployments.

• The Physics to P&L Narrative: Clearly articulate to executive stakeholders how infrastructure choices, data lake locality, storage tiering, and inference optimization directly influence their business model and operational efficiency.

• Deconstruct the Bottleneck: Move past the stated issue to uncover the technical truth. Convert vague business objectives (e.g., “We need lower rendering costs”) into specific engineering requirements (e.g., “We need to optimize the inference batch size on L40s to achieve a 30% reduction in cost-per-token”).

• Map the Transition: Assess where a customer stands on the spectrum from traditional service bureau to AI-native tech platform and recommend the precise infrastructure intervention needed to advance them.

• Build and Validate the Integration Layer: Identify, engage, and technically assess relationships with essential ISVs in the media and entertainment sector, spanning rendering, VFX toolchains, and generative AI platforms.

• Define the Standard: Supporting these tools is insufficient. You will establish reference architectures for optimal performance on Nebius infrastructure and collaborate directly with ISV engineering teams to develop and publish those standards.

• Decide What’s Worth Doing: Collaborate with the GM to assess ISV and partner opportunities based on their technical merit and strategic value, while also being discerning about what not to pursue.

• Shape the M&E Roadmap: Utilize field evidence to prioritize and substantiate the M&E vertical roadmap. You will work closely with Nebius’s global Head of Product and Head of Engineering to align partner and customer needs with product direction.

• Lead the M&E Product Summit: Chair a quarterly summit with Core Engineering leadership, leveraging field evidence to inform roadmap decisions and sustain vertical momentum.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 12 years of experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, distributed systems, or a closely related technical field.

• Executive Presence: Able to command a room of engineers and present a detailed technical roadmap to C-Suite executives. You have experience engaging at the highest levels, working alongside CTOs and VPs of Engineering.

• Builder Mentality: This is an individual contributor role. You create solutions rather than manage a team or delegate tasks; you are committed to architecting and delivering solutions with partners, and developing the assets (reference architectures, integration playbooks, technical frameworks) that solidify and scale Nebius’s M&E infrastructure strategy.

• Product-Minded: Experienced in defining a platform strategy rather than merely executing tasks. You can confidently tell a customer “No” when a request would incur technical debt and suggest a more viable alternative.

• Ambiguity Tolerance: You excel in dynamic environments where requirements are fluid. You don’t wait for a roadmap; you create one.

• Forensic Mindset: You seek deeper insights rather than settling for superficial responses. You investigate the kernel, logs, and P&L to uncover the truth.

• Mastery of the Stack: Possess expert-level, production-grade knowledge of GPU architectures (H100, L40s), Kubernetes orchestration including Soperator, high-performance and parallel file systems (e.g., Lustre, WEKA), data lake architecture, and networking constraints (InfiniBand/Ethernet).

• Inference Optimization: You grasp the intricacies of model serving, batch sizes, quantization, KV caching, latency trade-offs, and can design solutions for both high throughput and real-time (sub-50ms) requirements.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health Insurance: 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their families.

• 401(k) Plan: Up to a 4% company match with immediate vesting.

• Parental Leave: 20 weeks of paid leave for primary caregivers and 12 weeks for secondary caregivers.

• Remote Work Reimbursement: Up to $85/month for mobile and internet expenses.

• Disability & Life Insurance: Company-paid short-term, long-term, and life insurance coverage.