Tavern Research: Content Production Manager

Content Production Manager

Location: Chicago, IL

Office: 3 days/week in South Loop office

Reports to: Principal, Video Team

Employment Type: Fixed-term, benefits eligible, contract through end of 2026 cycle, with strong potential to convert to permanent

About Tavern Research

Tavern Research is a political tech startup building tools and insights to help our customers win elections and make better, evidence-based decisions. We specialize in scaling expert human work, such as content generation and survey research to support thoughtful, data-driven civic engagement. We're a venture-backed, mission-driven, fast-moving, and mostly technical team focused on supporting campaigns and organizations working to strengthen democratic participation. We are experimental by design and expect every team member to continuously improve how they work using new tools and technology. Everything else is on our website. If you still have questions, let us know when you apply!

About You

You're resourceful and relentless. When someone says "I need a clip of this candidate on cable news from last Tuesday," you find it. When the library of assets is a mess, you build a system that fixes it, and that other people can actually use. You have good instincts about what matters and what doesn't, and you build habits and workflows that let you operate at a pace most people can't sustain manually.

You're not waiting for someone to hand you a perfect process. You'd rather build one. If you can write a script that automates something you've been doing by hand, you will, but you'll also do it by hand until you can.

Maybe you spent a cycle as a tracker on a campaign, hunting down opponent clips from local news affiliates and cable archives at midnight. Maybe you built a research workflow from scratch and made it faster than anyone expected. Either way, you know how to find things — and you don't stop until you do.

About the Role

This is a hybrid production and engineering role at the center of Tavern's content pipeline. On any given day, you might be sourcing candidate clips from cable news archives, organizing a growing library of footage and photography, coordinating voiceover talent, or writing a tool that automates part of that process.

The manual work is real and it matters. We need someone who will do it well and with urgency. We also need someone who will look at that manual work and ask: how do I make this ten times faster?

This is not a creative lead role, but strong taste and sharp instincts will make you better at it.

Responsibilities

• Source and organize video clips, b-roll, photography, archival footage, and other media assets to match briefs from the delivery and production team.
• Build and maintain asset libraries — footage, photography, music, voiceover archives — that are organized well enough for the whole team to use.
• Coordinate voiceover talent end-to-end: casting, booking, session management, and delivery of clean final files.
• Source and license music — stock, custom, and original — and manage rights, clearances, and documentation.
• Identify opportunities to automate or accelerate manual production workflows, and build tools or scripts to do so.
• Track deliverables across multiple concurrent projects without losing track of anything.
• Identify and onboard new sources, libraries, and tools that expand what Tavern can produce.
• Support the broader delivery team with whatever production logistics a project requires.

Qualifications

• 0–2 years of experience in content production, media research, digital production, or a related field. New grads and career-switchers with strong relevant project work are welcome.
• Demonstrated ability to find things: clips, footage, assets, sources. You know how to dig and you don't give up.
• Exceptional organizational skills. You build systems that other people can actually use, not just systems that work in your head.
• Some technical ability — enough to write a script, automate a workflow, or build a simple tool when the manual version gets repetitive. Proficiency in Python or JavaScript preferred.
• Genuinely excited about AI tools and how they're changing production work. You're already experimenting with them for sourcing, tagging, transcription, and asset management, and you bring that curiosity to everything you build.
• Scrappy, resourceful, and unflappable under deadline.
• Enough fluency in video post-production to pull selects, check files, and know what good looks like. Whether that comes from hands-on editing experience or working with AI-generated output, you can spot quality and flag what falls short.
• Comfortable with basic image editing in Photoshop or a comparable tool — enough to crop, resize, or prep a still when needed.
• Political, advocacy, or campaign experience preferred but not required. Familiarity with the cadence and pace of political work is a real advantage.
• Bonus: an engineering background or early engineering career. If you think in systems and can build what you can't yet automate, we want to hear from you.

To be explicit: you don't need a degree to work here. You just need to be exceptional at the things we're asking from you.