ABOUT THE ROLE:
The Senior AI Video Technical Artist is a hands-on production role owning AI shot execution, reusable video workflows, technical QA, product-fidelity validation, and production-ready handoff across Skechers' product, social, advertising, and e-commerce channels.
Ownership boundaries: the Creative Technology Team lead owns platform architecture, approved infrastructure, and technical acceptance; the Technical Product Manager owns portfolio priority, approvals, rollout coordination, and outcome metrics; creative teams own briefs, creative direction, final finish, and publishing; Legal, Privacy, and Security define applicable rights and disclosure controls, which this role implements.
All work follows Skechers' content standards. Approved product imagery and geometry are authoritative: workflows must not invent or materially alter product silhouette, construction, materials, color, logos, or text, and where generative processing cannot preserve these within approved tolerances, the product is isolated and recomposited from approved source assets. Likeness work follows consented, contract-covered processes.
The role operates a governed production lane, opening to selective self-service for creative teams as workflows are approved, against a defined cross-channel production backlog, approved inference capabilities, and a clear path from successful pilots to sustained production.
WHAT YOU'LL DO:
- Execute AI video production: design, run, and refine workflows (image-to-video, motion, enhancement, upscaling, and compositing) on approved, enterprise-managed inference environments.
- Transform approved product photography and creative assets into dynamic motion content while preserving product fidelity; isolate and recomposite product elements from approved source assets wherever generative processing cannot hold tolerance.
- Produce and curate motion assets at volume through the governed production lane, with human-in-the-loop quality and brand review; creative teams own final finish.
- Build reusable motion templates, style frameworks, character and identity systems, and structured prompt systems that maintain brand and character consistency and scale across the pipeline.
- Maintain versioned, reproducible workflows: pinned model and custom-node dependencies, recorded job settings, and provenance for every deliverable.
- Define and apply quality and evaluation criteria for generated motion, including temporal consistency, artifacts, color and banding, product fidelity (silhouette, materials, logo integrity, geometry drift, warping, flicker), character and identity consistency across shots and variants, brand adherence, and how legibly synthetic the output reads to target audiences; contribute to the evaluation sets and QA gates that allow workflows to be approved and operated as systems.
- Deliver campaign-ready assets to spec: formats, codecs, alpha handling, aspect-ratio variants, safe areas, captions, color management, and versioned handoff.
- Provide video-specific training and documentation for creative teams, with rollout and ongoing support coordinated by the Technical Product Manager.
- Work against defined production metrics: approved assets shipped, cycle time, first-pass QA rate, re-render rate, template reuse, and unit cost.
- Monitor emerging video generation models and techniques and evaluate their fit within Skechers' existing AI ecosystem.
- Other duties as assigned.
SKILLS & REQUIREMENTS:
To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required.
- 5+ years of experience in video production, motion design, VFX, or creative technology, with substantial recent hands-on generative video work.
- Demonstrated portfolio of commercial AI-assisted video or motion work; portfolio review and a practical exercise are part of the interview process.
- Deep hands-on fluency with node-based generative pipelines (e.g., ComfyUI), including image-to-video workflows that leverage existing photography and creative assets.
- Demonstrated character and product consistency across shots, scenes, and campaign variants, using identity- and reference-conditioned workflows (e.g., IPAdapter, PuLID, InstantID, or equivalent) and continuity-preserving generation techniques; consistency work must be evident in the portfolio.
- Professional working proficiency in at least one compositing and finishing environment (After Effects, Nuke, or Resolve/Fusion), including masking, rotoscoping, tracking, cleanup, and matte integrity.
- Delivery craft: frame rates, codecs, alpha handling, aspect-ratio variants, safe areas, captions, and color-space and gamut management.
- Working Python and Linux comfort sufficient to automate, batch, and operate pipelines, with awareness of queues, retries, logging, VRAM constraints, and failure recovery.
- Ability to design structured, reusable prompt systems that scale across a pipeline rather than one-off prompts.
- Preferred: adapter fine-tuning such as LoRA for character, style, or product consistency; evaluation-set construction; agentic coding tools (e.g., Claude Code); experience with DAM/MAM asset workflows.
- Experience producing for social, digital, advertising, and/or e-commerce channels, with a strong eye for motion and brand consistency; footwear, fashion, apparel, or retail experience is a plus.
- Strong communication skills; able to collaborate effectively with creative, marketing, and technology teams in a fast-moving environment.
The pay range for this position is $100,000-$120,000/yr USD.
