Head of Content

Head of Content

We're hiring for DUST - https://www.dust.systems/

(Los Angeles/San Francisco)

What is DUST?

Every night the whole planet goes unconscious for eight hours, and the mind doesn't switch off. It dreams. It replays the day. It carries your stress into sleep and wakes you at 3am without telling you why. A huge part of your life with your mind happens in the dark, and almost nobody designs for it.

We do. DUST designs for the mind at night.

We're an MIT Media Lab spinout, and we founded the field of Dream Engineering: shaping what happens in the mind during sleep, on purpose, with sound and timing and sensors. In our studies we steered what people dreamed about successfully 92% of the time. The same tools can shape the stress that follows you to bed and the nightmares that keep coming back.

Our work has been featured on 60 Minutes, in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and in a BBC documentary. Our science runs from Harvard Medical School to Stanford Medical School. We make art too - overnight installations, museum commissions and live music. We just raised our seed, led by Future Ventures.

Almost all of it reaches people the same way. Through their ears, in the dark, with their eyes closed. That's this job.

What You'd Make

• Lullabies. We record ours with the most amazing musicians (last one was Philip Sheppard at Abbey Road). Adults need lullabies too and almost nobody is writing them for grown-ups who can't sleep.
• Sound for the unconscious. Some of what we make is played to you after you're already asleep. Cues timed to your sleep stage that steer a dream, or help a memory stick, or calm a body that's still bracing. You'd be making audio for a listener who can't hear it the normal way, and there's no playbook for that.
• Dream incubations. Guided audio at the edge of sleep that tells the mind what to dream about. It often listens.
• Courses with the scientists who did the research. Michael Grandner on insomnia, Leslie Ellis on embodied dreamwork, Westley Youngren on nightmares. Nightly, a few minutes each, built to actually change how someone sleeps.
• Science shows and podcasts about dreams. The researchers we work with have spent their lives on the strangest questions there are. Why we dream. What a nightmare is for. Whether you can learn in your sleep. Most people have never heard them tell it.
• Overnight art. Installations where a room of strangers falls asleep and dreams together. Live music played to people drifting off. Work with artists and museums that runs from dusk to morning.
• Bedtime voices. Poets, musicians, athletes, clinicians. We're already talking to people whose readings we want at bedtime.

Right now the CEO writes most of it. That doesn't scale, and it's the bottleneck on everything else. You'd own what people hear when they close their eyes.

The Role

Production and editorial both. Commissioning it, shaping it, and making sure it sounds like us.

• The content engine. A real pipeline from idea to shipped audio: brief, script, record, edit, master, publish. A CMS is coming that lets you ship without an engineer. You'd own the calendar and the throughput behind it.
• Editorial voice. Plain words, real science, no wellness mush and no fake calm. We say specific numbers and name the scientists who found them. Holding that line across dozens of voices is most of the job.
• Working with experts. Sleep scientists are not performers. Getting a principal investigator to say the true thing in a way that lands at 11pm, without flattening the science, is a craft. You'd do it on repeat.
• Collaborators. Musicians, sound designers, poets, artists. Finding them, briefing them, and getting their best work pointed at the night. As the app goes public, voices with real audiences become a growth lever as much as a content one.
• Clinical and partner content. Courses that sit inside clinical trials for addiction, PTSD and depression, and partner work that has to satisfy a brand and an IRB in the same draft.
• Measuring it. Which night people quit. Which teacher they come back for. What makes a second night happen. Content decisions here get made on evidence, same as the science.

You Are

• About 7+ years making audio, editorial or narrative content people chose to come back to. Podcasts, audiobooks, radio, music, meditation or course platforms. The medium matters less than the return rate.
• A writer and an editor. You can write a script yourself and make someone else's better without stamping your voice on it.
• You care how things sound. Texture, pacing, silence, the room a voice was recorded in.
• You've run a production pipeline, not just made individual pieces. Briefs, schedules, freelancers, budgets, masters that actually ship.
• Comfortable around evidence. We sit next to mental health and we're in clinical trials. Our credibility with scientists, clinicians and journalists is the whole asset, and you have to want to get it right.
• Taste that can hold strangeness. This is dreaming. We are not building the calm-blue-gradient wellness app.
• Self-directed. There's more good material here than hours to make it, and nobody is going to sequence it for you.

You Might Be At Exceptional Fit If

• You've built a content library that drove subscription retention, and you know which episodes did it.
• You've produced a science podcast or show that people who don't care about science still listened to.
• You've worked in music, sound design or audio drama.
• You've directed experts, academics or non-performers into recordings that sound human.
• You've made content inside a regulated or clinical context and found it clarifying rather than annoying.

Success Looks Like

• First month. A full read of what we have, what's working, and where people drop. A production pipeline written down that someone other than you could run.
• Months two and three. Shipping on a cadence without the CEO writing the scripts. The first outside voice commissioned, recorded and live. The first episode of something new.
• By six months, you should be able to tell us: which course makes someone a subscriber; which teacher people come back for; what we should stop making; and which three collaborators are worth more than the next thirty

Compensation

Salary plus early-stage equity, calibrated to experience. We're happy to talk structure early so you have clarity before you put in a lot of time.

You'd work directly with the CEO, with sound designers and musicians, and with our science collective of principal investigators from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and beyond. The work ends up in peer-reviewed journals, in museums, on 60 Minutes, and in someone's ears at 2am.