Product Engineer — Live Platform

Ellery for Creators — Ellery Studios, Inc.

About Ellery

Ellery is building a premium home for creator-led live entertainment: original, ticketed shows that give audiences a real reason to be there as they happen.

Through Ellery for Creators, we work with exceptional creators, production companies, and studios to develop, launch, and grow distinctive live formats. We are building a selective entertainment brand, not an open-volume marketplace. Every creator relationship and every audience experience should feel considered.

The Role

We are hiring a product-minded Founding Product Engineer to help build the platform behind Ellery’s ticketed live experiences.

You will work across the complete journey: the tools creators and internal teams use to prepare a show, the flows audiences use to discover and buy a ticket, and the systems that help everyone enter and experience the live room reliably.

This is not a narrowly defined feature-delivery role. You will spend time with creators, producers, operations, and audiences; understand how a live event actually comes together; and turn that operational reality into a product that feels simple without pretending the underlying work is simple.

You will have significant influence over product decisions, technical foundations, engineering standards, and how Ellery balances speed with reliability during its Founding Season.

What You’ll Do

• Build and improve product experiences across show creation, scheduling, ticketing, checkout, payments, refunds, waitlists, audience access, live viewing, and post-show operations.
• Develop creator and internal tools that replace fragile manual processes with clear, trustworthy workflows.
• Help build a reliable live experience around authenticated access, protected streaming ingest, playback, and real-time event state.
• Work closely with Programming, Creator & Studio Success, and Operations to understand what creators and shows need before translating those needs into product decisions.
• Join selected show-day workflows to observe where the product succeeds, where people create workarounds, and where operational risk remains hidden.
• Make pragmatic architecture decisions that support rapid learning without creating avoidable reliability or maintenance problems.
• Build useful observability, alerts, internal controls, and recovery paths for time-sensitive live events.
• Treat authorization, payments, personal data, content access, and partner credentials with appropriate security and care.
• Improve testing, documentation, deployment practices, and incident learning as the engineering function grows.
• Diagnose production issues across application code, integrations, data, infrastructure, and third-party services.
• Translate creator, audience, and operational feedback into focused product improvements.
• Collaborate on product priorities and challenge requests when a simpler solution would create a better experience.
• Help determine which capabilities Ellery should build directly and where trusted infrastructure partners are the better choice.
• Contribute to hiring and the engineering culture as the team expands.

What Success Looks Like

• Creators and internal teams can prepare and launch shows with progressively less manual intervention.
• Audiences can buy a ticket, understand what happens next, and enter the correct live experience with confidence.
• Important event-day conditions are visible before they become audience-facing incidents.
• When something fails, the team can identify the problem quickly and recover through deliberate fallback paths.
• Payments, refunds, access rules, waitlists, and show state remain accurate under real operational pressure.
• Product improvements reduce repetitive work for Creator Success, Programming, and Operations.
• The platform becomes more reliable with every show without becoming slower or harder to change.
• Technical decisions remain grounded in the real behavior of creators, production teams, and audiences.

What You Bring

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production software, ideally in an early-stage or high-ownership environment.
• Strong full-stack engineering ability across modern web applications, APIs, data models, and third-party integrations.
• Experience shipping user-facing products rather than working exclusively on isolated infrastructure.
• Sound judgment around reliability, security, maintainability, performance, and delivery speed.
• Experience with payments, authentication, permissions, transactional workflows, or other systems where correctness matters.
• The ability to investigate ambiguous problems across multiple layers of a system.
• Strong product instincts and care for interaction quality, language, and user trust.
• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical collaborators.
• Comfort working directly with users and participating in operational workflows to understand the product.
• A high degree of ownership and the willingness to improve an imperfect system without waiting for perfect requirements.

Especially Valuable

• Experience with live video, streaming media, RTMP or RTMPS ingest, HLS, playback systems, or media delivery infrastructure.
• Experience building ticketing, payments, marketplaces, subscriptions, or event platforms.
• Familiarity with real-time systems, event-driven architectures, queues, webhooks, and operational tooling.
• Experience designing resilient integrations with external providers.
• Experience with creator products, media workflows, audience communities, or entertainment technology.
• Familiarity with privacy, fraud prevention, content access, moderation, or trust and safety.
• Experience supporting products during live, time-sensitive events.

How We Work

We want to build an enduring entertainment company without sacrificing judgment, trust, craft, or follow-through. We value people who communicate directly, stay curious, take ownership, and care deeply about the experience on both sides of the stage.

Live events occasionally require engineering support outside standard office hours. We plan that coverage explicitly, build systems to reduce unnecessary intervention, and balance event schedules responsibly.

Ellery Studios, Inc. is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to building an inclusive team, partner network, and audience experience.