Head of Engineering

Primordial Soup • New York, NY

2d • Onsite

About The Position

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.

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.

Requirements

• 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.

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

• 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 This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed