Publishing Operations Manager

Early Media; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Job summary

Early Media in Austin, TX is seeking a Publishing Operations Manager who will own the handoff from finished masters to audiences, overseeing release calendars, publishing, and metadata across its slate. You will manage ingestion, QC, naming, thumbnails, and catalog placement; run thumbnail and title testing; maintain website and newsletter; monitor rights tooling and takedowns.

The role requires a highly organized individual with multi-title release experience and strong CMS skills, committed to

Qualifications

• You spot mislabeled episodes and resolve state gaps.
• You have shipped content on a published schedule across many titles.
• Hands-on CMS work across publishing back-ends; quick to learn new systems.
• You enforce naming conventions, synopsis formats, and thumbnail specs for consistency.
• Publishing operations focus over development or production; you drive the publishing lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• Release calendar: manage when titles go live across the slate and keep items on schedule.
• Publishing: ingest content, QC, attach metadata, schedule, and verify publishes.
• Presentation and metadata: manage titles, synopses, naming, thumbnails, and catalog placement; help establish platform voice; run testing loops.
• Owned surfaces: maintain website/landing pages and newsletters; keep editorial content up.
• Content defense: monitor for unauthorized uploads and handle takedowns within rights tooling.
• Connective tissue: translate release context to production, product, distribution and communications.

Skills

Ultra organized

Multi-title releases

CMS experience

Metadata standards

Cross-functional

Tools

Beehiiv

Substack

Webflow

Framer

Job description

About Early Media is creating and distributing groundbreaking original series. We craft narratives with viral potential while preserving the heart of indie production, telling meaningful stories audiences actually care about. Every creative decision is sharpened by a proprietary testing and marketing engine that collapses the distance between filmmaker and audience into the tightest iteration loop in the industry.

About Early Media

Early Media is creating and distributing groundbreaking original series. We craft narratives with viral potential while preserving the heart of indie production, telling meaningful stories audiences actually care about. Every creative decision is sharpened by a proprietary testing and marketing engine that collapses the distance between filmmaker and audience into the tightest iteration loop in the industry.

We're hiring a Publishing Operations Manager to own everything between a finished master and an audience seeing it: how each title is presented, when it goes out, and through which surfaces. You are the project manager for publishing – the single person who knows the state of every title on the slate.

What You'll Own

• Release calendar: What goes live when, and at what episode cadence, across the whole slate. You’ll drive the calendar and ensure releases stay on schedule. Tracking what each release depends on, checking on those items regularly, and helping to unblock anything that's running late.
• Publishing: Getting content onto the platform. Ingest, QC, metadata attachment, scheduling, and verifying that each release actually published correctly.
• Presentation and metadata: Titles, synopses, episode naming, thumbnails, key art, and catalog placement for every title and every episode inside it. You will help develop and implement the platform’s voice and style. You also run the thumbnail and title testing loop and feed what wins back into the standard.
• Owned surfaces: Our website/landing presence and newsletter: built, live, and maintained, plus the low-volume editorial that runs on them.
• Content defense: Keep our library enrolled in platform rights tooling, monitoring for unauthorized uploads, and issue takedowns.
• Connective tissue: Translating release context to production, product, distribution, and comms.

Must Have

• Compulsively organized: You're the person who spots the one mislabeled episode out of two hundred. Not knowing the state of something bothers you until it's resolved.
• Multi-title release experience: You've shipped content on a published schedule across many simultaneous titles — and held the schedule when something upstream slipped.
• Hands-on CMS work: Comfortable in a publishing back-end or streaming CMS — ingest, metadata fields, scheduling tools — and fast on one you've never seen before.
• Metadata rigor: You've written or enforced a house style — naming conventions, synopsis formats, thumbnail specs — and can explain why consistency compounds.
• Clear-eyed about the role: This is publishing operations, not development or production. If your ambition is to make the shows, you will be frustrated here.

Nice To Have

• Experience at a streaming service, digital publisher, or platform with a recurring release calendar
• Familiarity with vertical, social-first content and how it's consumed
• You've run release posts on a brand's own accounts, not just your own.
• Worked with rights or anti-piracy tooling, or filed takedowns yourself
• Newsletter and lightweight web CMS experience (Beehiiv/Substack, Webflow/Framer)
• Built a project management system that other people actually used
• Comfortable with analytics: reading browse-to-play and completion data and changing presentation based on it