Head of Engineering

Primordial Soup; New York (NY); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Primordial Soup, a New York–based generative AI lab and story studio, seeks an engineering leader to bring clarity, momentum, and energy to ambitious technical work. You will oversee a small but exceptional team, identify high-impact problems, translate them into executable plans, and maintain quality while moving quickly with judgment.

This hands-on role requires architectural direction, strong technical foundations, and close partnership with recruiting and leadership to shape the engineering

Qualifications

• Proven ability to lead senior technical teams toward fast and meaningful execution.
• Strong judgment about what to build and how to sequence work.
• Ability to energize teams and maintain momentum through uncertainty.
• Deep curiosity about generative AI and creative tech.
• History of applying new AI developments to real products.

Responsibilities

• Establish a fast, focused pace of execution across the engineering team.
• Identify top technical and product problems and sequence them for the team.
• Stay hands-on in high-leverage areas: prototyping, architecture, and critical implementation work.
• Track frontier models, agent systems, creative tooling, and AI-assisted dev work and apply findings to our products.
• Recruit, assess, and develop exceptional technical talent with recruiting.
• Build an engineering culture combining urgency, rigor, curiosity, creativity, and ownership.
• Communicate decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and timelines across teams and leadership.
• Partner with leadership on strategy, culture, and long-term direction.

Skills

Technical leadership

Architecture

AI systems

Talent recruitment

Job description

Primordial Soup is a generative AI lab and story studio founded by visionary filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. We invent original stories and the tools to tell them — merging bold narrative, emotional depth, and experimental workflows. From ANCESTRA, created with Google DeepMind, to our upcoming originals, we’re generating new IP, building cinematic tools, and shaping a creative model where artists and technology evolve together.

Our team is small and works at the cutting edge of what generative AI can create. We are based in New York City.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Video production is a $262B market — spanning film, marketing, corporate, creator, and education — and it’s about to undergo the same expansion that graphic design and web publishing experienced over the past 20 years as AI video generation rapidly advances. But today’s creative workflows remain brutally fragmented. Existing tools are either too basic, model-specific, or cumbersome; none combine generation, organization, collaboration, and agentic intelligence into a coherent creative process.

What we build will first serve our internal artists and productions, then scale outward to creators everywhere. This is a foundational leadership role at a company where engineering, storytelling, and AI-native creation are inseparable.

THE ROLE

You are an engineering leader who creates clarity, momentum, and energy around ambitious technical work. You know how to identify the highest-impact problems, translate them into an executable sequence, and help a small team of exceptional engineers move quickly without sacrificing judgment or quality.

You are deeply curious about AI and passionate about producing world-class creative content by orchestrating the latest models, tools, and techniques. You follow new developments closely, rapidly form a point of view about what matters, and turn emerging capabilities into practical advantages for the business.

This is a hands-on leadership role. With a small number of senior direct reports and increasingly powerful AI coding tools, you should remain a highly capable individual contributor focused on the highest-leverage areas: prototyping new systems, resolving difficult architectural questions, establishing technical direction, and accelerating critical projects.

You will also shape the composition and operating model of the engineering team. You’ll rigorously evaluate technical talent, partner closely with recruiting, and persuade exceptional people to join the company. You’ll help define what outstanding engineering looks like in an era when AI-assisted development is changing who the best engineers are, how they work, and how teams should be built.

As a leader of Primordial Soup, you’ll partner closely with leadership on company strategy and execution. You should be equally comfortable discussing architecture with engineers, explaining technical tradeoffs and timelines to creative and business leaders, and contributing to broader questions of culture, organizational design, recruiting, and company direction.

Deep expertise in AI is highly valuable, but intellectual velocity matters just as much. The right person will combine strong technical foundations with the curiosity and adaptability required to remain at the frontier.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Establish a fast, focused pace of execution across the engineering team.

• Identify the most important technical and product problems, determine how to sequence them, and keep the team aligned around clear priorities.

• Remain hands-on in high-leverage areas, including prototyping, architecture, technical evaluation, and critical implementation work.

• Track developments across frontier models, agent systems, creative tooling, and AI-assisted software development, then determine how they apply to our products and productions.

• Recruit, assess, and develop exceptional technical talent in close partnership with recruiting.

• Build an engineering culture that combines urgency, rigor, curiosity, creativity, and a high degree of ownership.

• Communicate technical decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and timelines clearly across engineering, creative, product, and company leadership.

• Partner with the company’s leadership on strategy, culture, organizational design, and long-term direction.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• A demonstrated ability to lead senior technical teams toward fast and meaningful execution.

• Exceptional judgment about what to build, what not to build, and how to sequence ambiguous work.

• The ability to energize teams, create ownership, and maintain momentum through uncertainty.

• Deep curiosity about generative AI, creative technology, and the changing nature of software development.

• A strong record of rapidly understanding new technical developments and applying them to real products or businesses.

• The technical ability and inclination to remain hands-on in high-leverage areas.

• Strong instincts for architecture, systems design, product development, and technical strategy.

• A rigorous approach to evaluating engineers and a record of attracting exceptional talent.

• The ability to communicate complex technical decisions clearly to technical, creative, and business audiences.

• The range to contribute as a company leader beyond engineering, including to strategy, culture, recruiting, and organizational design.

• Experience with modern AI systems, agent infrastructure, generative media, model evaluation, or related domains is a significant advantage.

Primordial Soup provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.

Primordial Soup is committed to a fair and transparent hiring process. We confirm that this advertisement is for an active, existing vacancy within our organization. Please be advised that we may use artificial intelligence-driven tools to assist our recruitment team in screening, assessing, and selecting candidates for this position.