Content Strategist: Short-Form & YouTube

Who we are

Fortino Studios is a San Diego video production and content marketing agency. We build content engines for B2B, SaaS, and local service companies the kind of clients whose founders are sharp on camera and have no idea what and how to post.

We run a system we call the Authority Engine: research, formatting, scripting, shooting, post, distribution, tracking. This role owns the front end of it, where we decide what's worth making.

We're a small team, so we move VERY FAST, which means you'll work directly with the Founder and the COO rather than through layers.

This is bigger than a content strategist role

The title is the closest one that fits, but it undersells the job.

Most content roles hand you a brief and ask you to fill it. This one puts you at the front of the decision. You're reading the data, calling the format, writing the script, and then watching what your call actually did. You own the thinking, not the output queue.

And the scope reaches well past social. You'll work across short-form, long-form YouTube, podcast, blog, and email. You'll build the systems we use to find winning formats, not just execute inside someone else's. You'll help shape how companies show up publicly. Over time, this becomes the seat that owns content strategy across the entire agency.

If you take it seriously, this will be the job where you learn more about content and marketing than anywhere else you could go right now. Here's why:

You'll see across accounts, not just one. An in-house social role teaches you one brand, one audience, one algorithm. Here you'll run content for multiple companies at once with different industries, different buyers, different platforms. You'll learn what actually transfers between accounts and what doesn't, and you'll build that pattern library in months instead of years.

You'll work on real budgets with real stakes. Our clients are funded companies with executive teams who care what their content does. Their numbers are in front of you every week. When you call a format and it works, you'll see it in the data. When you're wrong, you'll see that too and that feedback loop is the whole learning.

You'll get the full pipeline, not a slice of it. Most social jobs are downstream of somebody else's decisions. You'll sit at the front: reading performance data, choosing formats, writing the scripts that get shot. You'll watch your ideas go from a hunch to a shoot to a published video to a number on a report.

You'll be in the room. Small team, no layers. You'll work directly with the founder and the Director of Operations, and you'll hear the reasoning behind decisions rather than just receiving the outcome.

We'd rather you leave here in five years having become one of the sharpest content people in the market than stay ten years and plateau. If you want a quiet, easy narrow job, we're the wrong company.

Who we're looking for

You watch A LOT of content STRATEGICALLY, and you watch it as a habit rather than as homework. You have a Saves folder. You notice when a creator changes their hook structure. You've had the thought that thumbnail is doing all the work here.

You can also explain why something worked. Not the hook was good, but the first frame poses a question the viewer already had, and the payoff is withheld until 0:07 so the retention curve holds.

Most of what you watch is in English and made for a US audience. That matters, because everything you'll make here is aimed at American audience

You have HIGH attention of details and HIGHLY organized!

What you'll do

Content intelligence

• Scan client accounts for anything performing above 2x their baseline. Flag it in the client Slack channel with two or three sentences on why you think it worked.
• Pull emerging formats from Sandcastles AI and VidIQ. Log them in our idea bank with a note on which client they'd fit.
• Track cultural moments and news our clients or founders could move on quickly.
• Research thumbnails that are working.

Ideation & scripting (the core of the job)

• Translate winning formats into client-specific concepts, grounded in performance data.
• Write scripts for short-form video across client accounts.
• Write scripts for long form YouTube videos across client accounts
• Write scripts for our founders and clients personal content, which means learning distinct voices well enough that people can't tell it wasn't them.
• Support in creation of YouTube thumbnails.

Production support

• Keep the content pipeline current in Notion, including content pillar and funnel stage tagging.
• Write platform-native captions from approved scripts. What works on LinkedIn dies on TikTok.
• Generate YouTube thumbnails with the help of AI tools

Distribution & reporting

• Schedule approved content in Metricool and monitor the alerts channel.
• Deliver a monthly report per client answering what worked, why, and what we're testing next. Anyone can export the numbers. We're hiring you to read them.

Repurposing

• Turn long-form video and podcast episodes into LinkedIn posts, X/Threads posts, carousels, and articles that hold up on their own.

Internal marketing

• Podcast distribution: thumbnails, YouTube uploads, audio to Beansprout, and a blog post from each transcript.
• Support in creating assets for our monthly networking event: flyers, Instagram stories, and the email sequence around it.
• Instagram stories for our founders, from thought leadership through to bottom-funnel CTAs.

Schedule and responsiveness

This is a US night-shift role. Be certain that works for you before applying.

• Core responsive window: the first four hours of your shift. During that window we expect a Slack reply within 10 minutes.
• The rest of the shift is protected for scripting and research. Response time there is one business hour.
• On weekends: we're a small, fast-moving agency, and once in a while something lands outside normal hours, a client shoot that needs same-day turnaround, a moment worth posting before it passes. It's occasional, not routine, and we'll give you as much heads-up as we have. If your only availability is a hard Monday-to-Friday block, this probably isn't the right fit.

What you need

• Strong English, written and spoken. You'll draft in the voices of two American founders and join live calls with the team.
• Two-plus years in short-form or social content, agency or in-house.
• Real fluency in TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, and long-form YouTube as a creator first and a marketer second.
• Comfort with AI tools. We use them daily and expect you to have opinions about which ones earn their place.
• A stable work setup: fiber internet with a mobile data backup.

Helps but isn't required: B2B or SaaS experience, YouTube packaging (titles and thumbnails), Canva or Figma, light video editing, your own content account of any size.

Location: Open across the Philippines only

Logistics

• Part time at first, 20 hours per week (Potential full time employment after the first 60 days). Independent contractor, paid monthly in USD.
• Salary range for part time: $450 - $750 USD/month
• Paid time off and public holidays observed, coordinated with our production calendar.
• You'll report to our COO day to day, with a weekly session with our founder for taste calibration during the first 60 days.
• We want someone who grows together with us. If that's you, come join and apply.