**Please follow the instructions for your application at the bottom. Please merge your resume and your written answers into a single PDF.
Why this role exists
Nurture is building AI-native interactive video and games for young kids. Our internal pipeline is real and working, built collaboratively between product, engineering, and creative, but right now the bottleneck is creative direction. Our existing team comes from traditional production and hasn't been able to push the AI side; the people who can push the AI side often don't have the directorial chops to know what \"good\" looks like. You're the person who has both.
You'll work directly with the founding team on a project that's currently an internal tool but is on a path toward shaping Nurture's flagship product. The first few months will be heads-down making things. After that, if we're right about all this, you'll likely be hiring and leading other AI directors.
The role in one line
Direct end-to-end interactive video adventures for kids 4–7, using an AI-native production pipeline you'll help shape from script to final shot.
What you'll actually do
You'll own adventures from blank page to finished, playable stories. That means writing the script, designing the characters and world, making the shot-by-shot directorial calls, and driving an AI pipeline (~12 stages: concept, script, character refs, environment refs, storyboards, video shots, lip sync, audio, VFX, assembly) to produce the final result.
Concretely, in a given week you might:
* Break a 5-minute adventure into beats and shots, deciding what gets seen and what gets implied
* Write and rewrite prompts across the pipeline until characters feel consistent, pacing lands, and a 6-year-old wants to watch it again
* Make hundreds of micro-judgments about what's \"good enough to ship\" vs. \"needs another pass\", every iteration costs us money and time, and your taste is the throttle
* Push our internal tooling: tell engineering what's broken, what's missing, and where the next 10x improvement lives
* Build a small library of reusable characters, environments, and visual conventions so each new adventure gets faster and more coherent
* Sit with a kid (or a parent's video of one) watching your work, and notice exactly where their attention drifts
What we're looking for
* The non-negotiable: You're a real animation director or storyteller. You can talk about a shot in directorial language (\"the camera is doing too much work here,\" \"this beat needs to breathe\") and you have opinions about pacing, character, and what makes kids lean in. Whether that came from animation, live action, games, comics, or somewhere else matters less than the instinct itself.
* The other non-negotiable: You've gone deep on AI video / image generation as a creative medium. Not \"I've tried Midjourney\" deep, closer to \"I have a folder of 400 iterations on a single shot and can tell you why iteration #312 was the one.\" You're comfortable in the current toolchain (Runway, Kling, Veo, ComfyUI, Stable Diffusion, ElevenLabs, suno, whatever you reach for) and you're the kind of person who tries the new model the day it drops.
You probably also have:
* A body of work you can show, short films, AI shorts, indie game cutscenes, animated series episodes, comics, anything where you owned the creative outcome
* A point of view about what current AI video gets wrong, and the patience to work around it
* Enough technical literacy to know when a problem is your prompt vs. the model's limit vs. our pipeline, you don't need to write Python, but you need to think structurally
* Experience iterating against budget or time constraints (this matters: our economics live and die by iteration rates)
Nice but not required:
* Prior kids' content experience, strong storytelling instincts transfer, and we can teach the 4–7 lens
* Production pipeline experience at a studio (animation, games, vfx)
* Any background in education, child development, or kid-tested writing
What this is not
* This is not a role for someone who wants to outsource creative judgment to AI. The AI is the camera and the crew; you are still the director.
* This is not a traditional producer role. We're not hiring you to wrangle schedules or vendors. We're hiring you to do the work.
* This is not a role for someone who needs the toolchain to be stable. The pipeline changes weekly. Some weeks you'll fight it. We need someone who finds that energizing rather than exhausting.
How we'll evaluate you
After shortlisting, we will have an intro call and a portfolio review, finalists will get a paid trial: a short brief (about 30 seconds of finished story), access to our tool, and a few days. We're not evaluating the final output, that's bound by what our tool can do today.
We're evaluating how you work: which iterations you accepted, which you rejected, and whether you can walk us through the why in directorial language.
TO APPLY, SEND US YOU ANSWERS BELOW IN THE SAME DOC AS YOUR RESUME
* A portfolio, reel, or examples of work that best represent your creative and directorial instincts
* One short paragraph on a piece of AI-generated content you think is genuinely great, and why
* One short paragraph on a piece of AI-generated content you think is bad in an interesting way, and why
* A short written response (maximum 300 words) to the question below:
“Where do you think current AI animation and storytelling workflows still fail creatively, and where do they unlock genuinely new creative possibilities?”
Before submitting your application: Please merge your resume and your written answers into a single PDF.
Applications must include all requested materials to be considered.
Send your full application to
and
Location: Primarily remote, but need an overlap with Europe of at least 4 hours
Role Type: Contract