Performance Video Editor (Full time)

Remote · Independent contractor · GMT+8 overlap required
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WHO WE ARE

ARDANT is a demi-fine jewelry brand. Our core product is the Stay Close Hoop — a backless hoop earring in 925 sterling silver and 18K gold vermeil, built for women with sensitive ears who want to put earrings in and forget about them. We've served 175,000+ customers across the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Europe, with 7,000+ five-star reviews behind us.

We are a small, fully remote team. Paid social is the engine, and creative is the only real lever on it. We don't have a large brand team producing a handful of films a quarter — we have a creative operation that ships briefs, tests them, and iterates on what wins.
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THE ROLE

You are the person who turns a brief into an ad that holds attention and sells. Not brand films. Not showreels. Ads that get judged on hook rate, hold rate, and CPA within 72 hours of going live.

Two things make this seat different from a standard editing role.

First, volume and iteration - A brief lands with a script, a persuasion structure, footage sources, and a format spec. You build the edit, then you build the variants — new hooks on a proven body, new pacing, new overlays, new voiceover reads, new opens — so we can isolate what actually moved the number instead of guessing.

Second, you generate your own footage. - When a brief calls for a scene we don't have, we don't wait for a shoot. You produce it. That means independently prompting AI video and image tools to create usable b-roll, scenes, AI avatars and AI UGC — not as a novelty, as a standing part of the pipeline. If you need a woman in her thirties putting an earring in at a bathroom mirror at 6 am, we expect you to be able to make that shot exist by the end of the day.

The reason this role exists: our creative strategists can write faster than we can currently produce. Output throughput is the bottleneck on our testing velocity, and testing velocity is the bottleneck on growth.
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WHAT YOU'LL ACTUALLY DO

Cut to brief, at volume. - Our briefs follow a defined persuasion structure, and the structure isn't a suggestion. Your job is to make each beat land in the time it has, and to know when a beat is dying on screen and needs to be flagged back to the strategist rather than quietly smoothed over.

Generate AI footage, avatars, and AI UGC. - You'll work independently in tools like Higgsfield and the current generation of video and image models to produce shots that don't exist in our footage library: lifestyle b-roll, environment and texture shots, synthetic presenters for talking-head UGC, and stylised sequences. You own the prompting, the reruns, the selects, and the cleanup. We're not looking for someone who has "played with" these tools — we're looking for someone who can hit a specific creative direction with them, repeatedly, under a deadline.

Keep AI output consistent and honest. - This is the hard part, and it's where we'll evaluate you most closely. Character consistency across shots. Product accuracy — an AI-generated earring has to look like our actual earring, on the correct part of the ear, with the correct backing. And a clear sense of where these tools still fail: hands, close-up jewelry on skin, reflective metal, on-screen text. Knowing what not to ship is as valuable as knowing how to generate it.

Build hook and variant matrices. - Most of your volume won't be new concepts — it'll be disciplined variants off winners. First three seconds, alternate opens, caption treatments, VO reads, thumbstop frames. You'll be organised enough that we always know which variant is which when the data comes back.

Own the assembly layer. - Sourcing and selecting from creator/UGC footage, our own product footage, stock and your own AI generations; subtitle and overlay discipline that reads on a phone at arm's length with sound off; AI voiceover casting and pacing that doesn't tip into uncanny; audio levelling; native cuts for Meta and TikTok in the right ratios rather than one master squeezed into three placements. Animated statics and motion carousels sit with you too.

Read the numbers on your own work. - You'll have visibility into performance, and we expect you to use it. Where does retention drop? Which hook is carrying the ad? Which of your three variants is doing the work and why? An editor who forms a point of view from the retention curve is worth several who wait to be told.

Respect the claims line. - Jewelry has real compliance exposure. No "-proof" language, no "solid gold" (we're vermeil), no unqualified swimming claims — and no AI-generated visual that implies a product feature we don't have. If a brief hands you a durability or hypoallergenic claim you can't verify, you flag it for sign-off. You don't put it on screen and hope.
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WHAT WE NEED YOU TO ALREADY BE GOOD AT

You've edited paid social video for a D2C brand or a performance-focused agency, and you can point to specific ads you cut and what they did on spend. Not a mood reel — actual work, actual outcomes.

You are already generating AI footage in production work, not experimenting with it on weekends. You can talk specifically about which tools you reach for and why, how you hold a character or a product consistent across a sequence, and what your hit rate looks like — how many generations it typically takes you to land a usable shot.

You are fast without being sloppy, and you know the difference between polish that changes performance and polish that only makes the editor feel better. You cut for a muted, vertical, thumb-scrolling viewer as a default rather than an afterthought.

You're fluent in whichever NLE you prefer (Premiere, After Effects, CapCut, DaVinci — we care about output, not your timeline), and you're comfortable working inside ClickUp with clear naming and handoff hygiene. You write clearly in English, because most of our coordination is asynchronous text.

Nice to have: motion graphics and text animation beyond basic keyframes; experience with AI dubbing or lip-sync for multi-market localisation; experience editing for a sensitive-skin, health-adjacent or accessibility-framed audience; TikTok Spark ad experience.
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WHO YOU'LL WORK WITH

You'll operate and work in one of our creative pods led by a creative strategist and potentially other video editor(s).
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LOGISTICS

Independent contractor engagement with Ardant LLC. Fully remote, with meaningful overlap with GMT+8 required for live review.

• Monthly fee
• Performance bonus in place
• AI tool credits: covered by us

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WHO THIS ISN'T FOR

If your best work is a 90-second brand film with a licensed track and no captions, this will frustrate you. If you think AI generation is beneath a real editor, this isn't the seat — a meaningful share of what you ship will be footage you created rather than footage you were handed. If you need a locked brief and two weeks per asset, this will frustrate you. And if you'd rather defend an edit than test against it, this will definitely frustrate you.

We're looking for someone who finds it satisfying that the scoreboard updates every day.
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HOW TO APPLY

Send us:
1. Three to five paid social ads you personally cut, with a line each on the brief you were given and how the ad performed.
2. At least one example of AI-generated footage or an AI avatar/UGC ad you produced, with the prompt approach behind it and roughly how many attempts it took.
3. One ad — ours or a competitor's — that you think is underperforming, and what you'd change in the first three seconds.

Shortlisted candidates get a paid test brief: one edit from supplied footage, and one shot you have to generate yourself to a written direction. It's paid because we're asking for real work, and it's the part of the process that actually tells us anything.