Staff / Principal Product Manager, Cinematica

Job Description

Job Description

Inkitt is building the Disney of the 21st Century, standing at the forefront of technology and entertainment. Leveraging AI and predictive algorithms, Inkitt discovers unknown stories and turns them into blockbuster hits, producing a new $1M ebook every 7 days and selling directly to consumers through its Inkitt Galatea app. Bestsellers are then translated onto the screen through Inkitt CandyJar, the #1 US-based microdrama platform with billions of episodes streamed to date. Inkitt has become the 11th most bestseller-generating publisher in the world, boasting a 40x higher hit-rate than traditional publishers. Backed by some of the top VC’s such as: Khosla, Kleiner Perkins, and NEA Ventures, our recent expansion into Ironblood, the first AI Native streaming platform for action and adventure, is only the beginning of our journey to becoming the next-gen entertainment powerhouse.

Cinematica is our AI-native video studio: it turns stories into high-quality, cinematic videos. It brings the creative and technical production workflow, from adaptation and shot generation to character consistency, music, editing, and quality evaluation, into one integrated platform. Cinematica is a leap toward our larger vision: becoming the operating system that enables storytellers to bring any story to life, in any format.

 

How We Work — please read this part carefully

Ali, our founder and CEO, sets company priorities. You own the ideas. You will spend part of every day researching competitors, the industry and our users to generate new feature ideas, and you will keep a live Top 3 list of the highest-impact ideas for your area — a new idea only enters by beating one already on it.

You pitch on a single slide with an impact calculation attached. Anything over a week of engineering needs a methodical business case demonstrating ROI. Ali rejects ideas that will not move the number enough to justify the build, and he does so often. The loop is pitch, get rejected, sharpen, re-pitch — continuously, alongside delivery.

Once approved, you own execution outright, including release and A/B ramping. Four weeks after launch, every feature is reviewed against the impact you predicted before you built it. Your performance is measured on two things: how often you beat your own Top 3, and the realised impact of what you ship.

This is not a role where a roadmap is handed to you and you are judged on delivering it. If that is the job you are looking for, this will frustrate you, and we would rather you knew now.

What You'll Do:

• Own the Cinematica roadmap end to end — adaptation, shot generation, character and style consistency, music, editing and quality evaluation — and decide what gets built first, what gets cut, and what waits
• Turn a production process that today depends on individual judgement into a platform other people can run: our own studio first, then storytellers beyond Inkitt
• Define what "good" looks like for an Inkitt story on screen, write it down, and hold the line on it
• Build the evaluation system behind that bar: rubrics, benchmarks, blind comparisons and human review loops, so quality becomes something the team can measure and argue about with evidence rather than taste alone
• Own the model and prompt strategy, and the buy-versus-build calls underneath it, with engineering, design, analytics and user research
• Drive improvements through their entire product lifecycle: ideation, specification, development, release, analysis and iterations
• Run a tight iteration loop: ship, watch what viewers actually do, diagnose precisely what failed, feed it back into the pipeline, measure the delta
• Work shoulder to shoulder with our Creative Director and AI-Video Production team — your first users — turning craft judgement into systems that hold up without any one person in the room
• Educate and influence cross functional stakeholders and leadership to secure buy-in on the roadmap, and communicate your hypotheses and results to team members and leadership
• Make quality legible: report it as a number that moves, and connect it to what it does for retention and conversion

What You'll Bring:

• 6+ years of professional experience at a fast growing tech company, building creative prosumer/enterprise tools or AI-powered products. We measure years on the job, not years holding a “product manager” title.
• A roadmap you owned outright: you set the sequence, you decided what didn't get built, and you can explain what that cost and why it was right
• Demonstrable taste. You can watch two pieces of generated video, articulate precisely why one is better, and turn that judgement into a rubric someone else can apply without you
• Proven track record owning the quality of creative output at scale, and building the systems that measured it — benchmarks, human eval, blind comparisons, A/B — plus a point of view on where automated metrics stop being useful. Generative AI, film and TV post-production, games, animation or creative tooling all count
• You have made things yourself, not only managed people who make things. Be ready to walk us through something you personally produced — a shipped feature, a film, a reel, a side project
• Exceptional analytical skills where you can quantify both qualitative/quantitative data to make product and strategic decision - i.e. Advanced SQL skills
• Self starter that can deliver results with limited supervision and thrives in a fast-paced environment
• Strong product intuition and UX design sensibilities, with a user centric mindset
• Willing to roll up your sleeves to go above and beyond to make things successful
• Ability to work closely with cross-functional stakeholders to determine first-class solutions
• Location: Onsite in San Francisco Bay Area

Who We Are Looking For:

• Autonomous
• Bring solutions instead of problems
• Data driven
• Quick to action
• A high functioning workaholic
• Looking for exponential career growth
• Have lots of fun building a generational AI x Entertainment company

What We'll Offer:

• 401k plan, designed to help you save for the future
• Health benefits tailored to your needs, including medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Professional coaching for everyone
• Team-building events, including our annual Tulum trip
• Unlimited access to our Galatea app and CandyJar app. 
• Unlimited budget for self-development books
• Charity donation of your choice at your one year anniversary
• Free lunch in office everyday
• Class Pass membership for US based employee and gym access for Berlin employees
• Dog-friendly offices in Berlin and San Francisco

Salary offers are determined based on the candidate’s experience, skills, and alignment with the requirements of the role, as well as internal equity and market benchmarks

We are open to hiring this role at either Staff or Principal level. The posted range spans both. We calibrate level during the interview process based on the scope you have owned, and we will tell you where we have landed before we make an offer.

At Inkitt, we strive to build a company culture and provide employment opportunities based on diversity and inclusion. We believe every author should have an equal opportunity to succeed, as should our team members. As a growing team from 20+ countries, we welcome everyone to apply.  

We look forward to hearing from you!

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