Lead Engineer

About Big Shot Pictures

Big Shot Pictures is a next generation animation company founded by Brian Robbins that produces the franchises of tomorrow. With a distinctive digital-first approach, the company builds global animation franchises across all platforms – from digital to theatrical, gaming to streaming, and consumer products to experiences. Big Shot has a first-look theatrical distribution deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment and is backed by strategic investment from Greycroft, Sony Pictures, MarcyPen Capital Partners, ValueAct Capital, and CAA.

The Role

The Lead Engineer oversees the design, development, and operation of internal platforms and tooling that power our YouTube-first content engine. This includes solutions supporting pre-production, animation, post-production, publishing, live-streaming, analytics, and other studio workflows. The Lead Engineer ensures the studio has the tools to operate with high velocity while maintaining reliability, scalability, and long-term flexibility.

Key Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership

• 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.

Platform & Tool Development

• 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

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• 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

Infrastructure & Reliability

• 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

Qualifications

• 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