Overview
Join us at the forefront of entertainment innovation! We at Malao are on a mission to transform the entertainment industry, creating inspiring stories with positive role models that spark change in our world. Across innovative technology platforms, original films and unique location-based experiences, at Malao you'll dive into a game-changing environment where we combine human intuition with artificial intelligence to bring the world more Meaningful Entertainment.
We are building two platforms to enhance the entertainment ecosystem: Twinkle is a B2C entertainment discovery app that aims to become the go-to destination for users overwhelmed by content choices, being a cinematic compass that combines the best of artificial intelligence with human intuition to transform how people find and share films they'll love. Sputo is our "Studio of the Future" — a platform for tomorrow's filmmakers that combines project management, game engine technology and intelligent agent-based systems into one coherent product. Both depend on the same foundation — deep, high-quality film data.
With successful fundraising from investors, Creative Europe MEDIA and the European Institute of Technology Culture & Creativity, we're now working to build and bring these platforms to the wider market.
What you'll be working on
- Building and expanding the film metadata layer that powers both Twinkle and Sputo — taking our current dataset from around fifteen fields per film to fifty or more nuanced, structured fields that unlock intelligent discovery, filtering, and AI-driven recommendations
- Designing and running AI-assisted pipelines to generate enriched metadata at scale — using LLMs and retrieval strategies to extract fields like genre breakdowns, narrative location, tone, themes, audience signals, and more from existing public datasets, partner data, and primary sources
- Working with large, real-world film datasets — from freely available sources like TMDB or Wikidata to partner data — cleaning, normalising, and structuring them so they can power production systems reliably
- Developing and validating the prompting strategies, frameworks, and logic that determine how metadata fields are generated, including how to handle edge cases, less well-known films, and data quality issues at scale
- Collaborating closely with the backend engineer and product team to ensure enriched data flows correctly into both platforms, is structured for efficient querying, and translates into user-facing features that actually work
- Staying at the forefront of how AI tools and publicly available datasets can accelerate what we build — and proactively identifying new data sources, techniques, or approaches that give Malao a competitive edge
What we're looking for
- You have hands-on experience working with large, messy, real-world datasets, knowing how to source, clean, structure, and validate data at scale, and you don't need perfect inputs to produce reliable outputs
- You are fluent in Python and comfortable with the data science stack, i.e. pandas, NumPy, and similar tools are second nature, and you know how to move from exploratory analysis to something production-ready
- You have practical experience using LLMs and prompt engineering to generate structured data — you think carefully about prompting strategy, understand the failure modes, and know how to design for consistency and quality at scale
- You are genuinely curious about film and entertainment data — you understand why metadata quality matters and you are excited by the challenge of capturing something as nuanced as narrative, tone, and genre in structured form
- You have a flexible approach to challenges, coupled with the readiness to pivot as required in a dynamic startup environment
- You align with Malao's strong value set of truth, justice, courage, gratitude and joy, demonstrating integrity and a willingness to collaborate with others, and enthusiasm for personal and professional growth in an environment encouraging open communication and candour
What we offer
- Work directly with the founders and founding team of a fast-paced startup crossing entertainment and technology
- Wellpass subscription, giving you access to the top gyms, fitness clubs and spas
- Monthly team events, including free dinners, game nights, internal hackathons and active offsites
- A paid cinema ticket every month (your choice of movie!)
- Support with relocation to Munich, including access to the WERK1 apartment program (flat for only €850 per month on short-term contract)
- A competitive salary package, including VSOP employee participation program