Field CTO

Role Description

The Technical Director of Media and Entertainment, AI Infrastructure is a senior engineering leader who will initially operate as an individual contributor at the intersection of deep AI infrastructure engineering and the business of media and entertainment, with a clear path to building and leading a team as the business scales.

You will work alongside CTOs and engineering leaders at studio groups, VFX houses, gaming studios, agency holding companies, and generative AI model companies. Your role is not to pitch them; it is to build with them. You will translate their most complex infrastructure problems into engineered solutions, own the technical relationship with our most strategic ISV and cloud-native partners, and use what you learn in the field to directly influence the M&E product roadmap alongside Nebius's global Head of Product and Head of Engineering.

This is a ground-floor opportunity to define what AI-native infrastructure looks like for an industry in the middle of a fundamental transformation.

You are welcome to work remotely from the United States (SF Bay Area or NYC preferred). Travel expectations 10% - 20% for executive meetings and key industry events.

Responsibilities

• AI Infrastructure Architecture
  • Own the Technical Blueprint: Personally architect the infrastructure solutions for our most strategic M&E partnerships, studio-scale content production pipelines, agency data consolidation plays, generative AI model deployments.
  • The Physics to P&L Narrative: Fluently demonstrate to executive stakeholders how infrastructure decisions, data lake locality, storage tiering, inference optimization, directly impact their business model and operability.
• Forensic Requirement Gathering
  • Deconstruct the Bottleneck: Go beyond the stated problem to find the technical truth. Translate vague business goals (e.g., “We need lower rendering costs”) into precise engineering requirements (e.g., “We need to optimize the inference batch size on L40s to reduce cost-per-token by 30%”).
  • Map the Transition: Identify exactly where a customer sits on the curve from legacy service bureau to AI-native tech platform and prescribe the specific infrastructure intervention needed to move them forward.
• ISV & Partner Technical Strategy
  • Build and Validate the Integration Layer: Identify, engage, and technically validate relationships with the most critical ISVs in the media and entertainment landscape, from rendering and VFX toolchains to generative AI platforms.
  • Define the Standard: You will define the reference architectures for how they run best on Nebius infrastructure, and work directly with ISV engineering teams to build and publish those standards.
  • Decide What’s Worth Doing: In partnership with the GM, evaluate ISV and partner opportunities on their technical merit and strategic leverage, and be equally rigorous about what not to pursue.
• Internal Technical Influence
  • Shape the M&E Roadmap: Use forensic evidence from the field to prioritize and justify the M&E vertical roadmap.
  • Lead the M&E Product Summit: Chair a quarterly summit with Core Engineering leadership, using field evidence to drive roadmap decisions and maintain vertical momentum.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, distributed systems, or a closely related technical domain.
• Executive Presence: Capable of commanding a room of engineers and presenting a layered technical roadmap to a C-Suite.
• Builder Mentality: This role begins as a hands-on individual contributor position.
• Product-Minded: Experience defining a platform strategy, not just executing tickets.
• Ambiguity Tolerance: You thrive in environments where requirements are evolving.
• Forensic Mindset: You dig into the kernel, the logs, and the P&L to find the truth.

Requirements

• Mastery of the Stack: Expert-level, production-grade knowledge of GPU architectures (H100, L40s), Kubernetes orchestration, high-performance and parallel file systems, data lake architecture, and networking constraints.
• Inference Optimization: Understanding of model serving, batch sizes, quantization, KV caching, latency tradeoffs.
• Industry Fluency: Experience within the M&E ecosystem and infrastructure implications across gaming, multimodal generative models, AdTech, VFX/content production.
• Non-negotiable: Deep, production-grade working knowledge of GPU infrastructure and inference-based solutioning.

Benefits

• Health Insurance: 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and families.
• 401(k) Plan: Up to 4% company match with immediate vesting.
• Parental Leave: 20 weeks paid for primary caregivers, 12 weeks for secondary caregivers.
• Remote Work Reimbursement: Up to $85/month for mobile and internet.
• Disability & Life Insurance: Company-paid short-term, long-term, and life insurance coverage.