Senior PD
Description
PRODUCER / DIRECTOR (PD)
Live tutor cohort — Studia launch role
KEY DETAILS
Reports to: COO
Engagement: Full-time freelance, June through September launch and beyond
Day rate: £2,000 per week, inclusive of holiday
Working pattern: Daytime weekdays for format and prep; evening and weekend cover for livestreams
Location: Hybrid — London. Tuesdays and Thursdays in office at Venture X, Wood Lane
Cohort: 5 anchor educreators (scaling)
Platforms: Studia, YouTube, TikTok
Subjects at launch: GCSE English Literature (Macbeth), Maths, Biology, Chemistry, Physics
Start date: ASAP — latest early June, ahead of 8 September launch
ABOUT STUDIA
Studia is bringing the creator economy to education. Students subscribe to the tutors they love for £19.99/month and get livestreamed lessons, AI support trained on that tutor's material, and a growing library of recorded classes — with optional 1-to-1 sessions when they need deeper help. Think Twitch meets Patreon, for GCSE, A-Level and beyond.
We launch on 8 September 2026 with 85 verified 1:1 tutors and five anchor educreators running daily GCSE livestreams across Macbeth (English Literature), Maths, Biology, Chemistry and Physics. Studia sits at the intersection of education and entertainment. The education is in good shape: passionate, deeply credentialled tutors, several from Oxbridge. The entertainment is the work to do. One-to-one, they're engaging; in front of a camera and a live chat, the magic doesn't yet translate. That's where this role comes in.
THE ROLE
This is a senior Producer / Director role. You will own the on-screen quality of our launch cohort end to end — the show format, the talent, the technical look, the live direction, and the social cut-downs that pull new students in.
In TV terms, you'll be doing the work of three people: a format producer, a talent producer, and a PD. We need a senior person who can wear these three hats with seven or eight years in the business minimum, with serious shooting and live-direction chops.
Our students live on Twitch, TikTok Live and YouTube. They want relatable, native, human content — not a high-gloss TV aesthetic imposed on top. The brief is to bring TV-grade craft to a creator-economy format, not to make a creator-economy product look like ITV. The right person knows the difference and can hold both.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
1. SHOW FORMAT — THE PLAYBOOK
• Build the repeatable Studia show format: the structure of a one-hour live lesson plus 30-minute Q&A, including cold-opens, hooks, segments, polls/quizzes, chat-handling beats, sign-offs.
• Make the format strong enough that any new tutor can step into it within a week. If a tutor is sick or replaced, the show goes on.
• Define the Studia house style: on-screen graphics, lower thirds, intros, outros, the visual and tonal signature of a Studia stream.
• Maintain a living format playbook documented per subject and per tutor, capturing what we learn week to week.
2. TALENT TRAINING AND PRESENTER COACHING
• Turn passionate but camera-shy academics into confident live presenters. Most have never performed to camera before.
• Run a 90-minute baseline session with each educreator in week one to set technical and performance benchmarks.
• Hold a weekly 1:1 with every tutor in the cohort — reviewing replays, metrics and chat logs, agreeing one or two areas of focus for the week.
• Run group workshops on the craft of live teaching: pacing, eye contact, reading chat, handling silence, energy management, building personal story, driving engagement.
• Help each tutor surface what makes them distinctive — their route into the subject, their signature analogies, the moments of genuine passion — and shape that into an authentic on-screen persona.
• Act as a casting sense-check on our final tutor selection, working alongside our talent recruiter (currently Peloton's Head of Talent Recruitment). We have around 25 candidates for five live-streaming slots; this is a sanity check, not a full TV casting process.
3. TECHNICAL DIRECTION — THE PD CRAFT
• Audit each tutor's home setup individually — camera angle, framing, lighting, background, audio, internet — and bring every one up to a consistent, premium-but-relatable standard. Source kit where needed.
• Define the look: where the tutor sits, what's behind them, how the room is lit, where the screen-share lives in the frame. Many of our tutors are at university and will be streaming from dorm rooms; the setup needs to look intentional, not improvised.
• Decide format decisions like green screen vs collapsible backdrop vs in-room — we're open, but it has to read as creator content, not staged TV.
• Run technical test runs before every tutor's first stream and after any change of kit or location.
4. LIVE DIRECTION DURING STREAMS
• Attend every stream in the launch cohort.
• Where useful, give live direction in-ear during streams — framed as a caring friend in the room, not a TV gallery barking orders. Pull a tutor back when they're losing the room, prompt a poll, slow them down, change tack.
• Take structured notes during and after each stream on what worked, what didn't, and what to test next week.
• Review chat logs after each stream as a data source: recurring questions, points of confusion, moments where the room went quiet.
5. SHORT-FORM CONTENT FOR TIKTOK AND YOUTUBE
• Develop an instinct for the moments in a lesson most likely to perform as standalone TikTok or YouTube Shorts clips.
• Brief or directly cut short-form edits — framed and shaped differently for each platform — for posting on social media.
• Build a library of evergreen, repurposable content from every live stream so the platform compounds in value over time.
• Track which clips drive followers, signups and stream attendance, and feed those learnings back into how tutors structure live lessons.
6. BACKUP AND CONTINGENCY — THINGS ON THE SHELF
• Make sure we never have dead air. Pre-record four to five backup lectures per subject early in the engagement so we always have something on the shelf if a tutor is unwell or there's a technical failure.
• Own the logistics when a tutor can't stream: standby plans, substitute coverage, and clear communication to subscribers.
• Build triple redundancy into the live setup with the engineering team, so a single point of failure doesn't take a stream off air.
7. TUTOR WELLBEING AND RESILIENCE
• Prepare each tutor for failure states before they happen: a troll in chat, a hard question they can't answer live, a mid-stream technical failure, a session with only a dozen viewers. Rehearse them.
• Set a clear psychological safety contract: early streams are practice, low viewer counts are expected, rough moments are data, not verdicts.
• Monitor cohort morale actively, especially in the first four weeks. Check in informally, not just in formal 1:1s. Escalate to the COO or CPO when a tutor is struggling beyond what coaching can address.
• When a stream goes badly, you are the person who calls that tutor that evening.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
You probably:
• Have spent at least 7–8 years in TV, factual entertainment, live entertainment or a comparable creator-led environment. You've been on shoots, in galleries, and in edit suites.
• Have credits as a Producer / Director or Format Producer on live or near-live shows where talent had to perform in real time.
• Are technically fluent and hands-on: cameras, lighting, audio, OBS or vMix, encoders, green screen and live keying, talkback, decent home internet. You can fix what's in front of you.
• Have built a show format from scratch — segments, runs of show, talent prompts, recovery beats — and made it repeatable across a roster of presenters.
• Have coached non-professional talent into camera-ready presenters. You can give difficult feedback in a way that leaves someone better, not smaller.
• Understand the creator economy live, not just in theory. You watch Twitch, TikTok Live and YouTube Live, and you can articulate why a streamer is sticky and why a TV format would feel cringe to a 14-year-old.
• Can edit short-form video to a high standard — Riverside, Descript, CapCut, Premiere or equivalent — and have a feel for the difference between a TikTok hook and a YouTube Shorts hook.
• Have a casting eye. You know that 75% of a live show is who's on screen, and you can sense-check a final shortlist.
• Are calm in a crisis. When a stream is wobbling 90 seconds before going live, you are the person who fixes it.
• Care about education. You don't need a teaching background, but you need to believe this matters.
Nice to have:
• Credits on factual entertainment, live entertainment or competition formats.
• Experience launching a creator from zero to an active community.
• Familiarity with chat moderation, community building, and Discord-style audience tools.
• Comfort with analytics — watch time, retention curves, click-through, conversion to subscription.
• Background in EdTech, edutainment, or formal teaching.
HOW WE WORK
This is a full-time freelance engagement starting as soon as possible — ideally early June — running through to our 8 September marketing launch and beyond. We expect this to be the foundation of Studia's in-house production capability as the cohort scales beyond the first five educreators.
The first eight weeks are weighted heavily towards casting sense-check, talent training and locking in the format. From late summer onwards the focus shifts to live shows, weekly coaching cycles, and feeding the social engine with short-form content.
It's a hybrid role based in London. Tuesdays and Thursdays are in-office at Venture X, Wood Lane, alongside the rest of the Studia team. Other days you'll work from wherever suits the cohort — at a tutor's home setup, on location for a stream, or from your own desk. Most livestreams will run in late afternoons, evenings and weekends, around the school day, so the working pattern flexes around the cohort's schedule.
You will work directly with the COO (Eleanor Bird) and CPO (Ben Lavender), with a short, clear feedback loop into product, design and operations. We are a small team and you will be expected to act like an owner.
Day rate: £2,000 per week, inclusive of holiday.
HOW TO APPLY
Send a short note explaining why this role and what you'd want to bring to it, plus links or examples of live or short-form content you've produced or directed. Showreels, broadcast credits, channel links, Twitch VODs, TikTok handles — whatever shows the work.
Email via The Talent Manager with the subject line 'Producer / Director'.
Please mention who referred you in your application.Company Name
Duration
4 months minimum (early June through September launch), with a clear path to extend as we scale the educreator cohort.
Location
London
Salary
£2,000 per week (inclusive of holiday)
Posted on
12th May 2026
Apply by
26th May 2026