How to Apply to Skydance

12 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 31 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • Skydance is now the controlling nucleus of Paramount. The August 2025 merger put David Ellison in charge of CBS, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, and the rest of the Paramount portfolio. You are applying to a top-five Hollywood major in the middle of a hard restructuring.
  • Two ATS systems are currently live. Skydance-origin roles are on Lever at jobs.lever.co/skydance (verified live and actively hiring as of April 2026). Paramount-origin roles remain on Workday at careers.paramount.com. Check both.
  • Hiring is division-specific. Animation, Interactive and Games, Sports, and core production technology are growing. Linear cable, MTV News, and overlapping Paramount corporate functions are contracting.
  • Portfolio or reel URL is not optional for creative or interactive roles, even when the Lever form marks it optional. Include it in the resume header as well.
  • The process is on-site, relationship-driven, and slow compared to tech. Expect four to six rounds over three to six weeks for IC roles, longer for senior and creative leadership.
  • Watch for recruitment fraud. Skydance will only contact you from an @skydance.com address. Anything else is an impersonation attempt.

About Skydance

Skydance Media, founded in 2010 by David Ellison (son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison), spent its first fifteen years as a mid-sized but extraordinarily well-capitalized producer of event films and premium television. Top Gun: Maverick, the Mission: Impossible franchise, Grace and Frankie, Reacher, Jack Ryan, and Foundation all came out of Skydance's Santa Monica, California headquarters or its production partnerships. Before 2025, it employed roughly 1,500 people across film, television, animation, sports, games, and interactive divisions, and was privately owned by the Ellison family, RedBird Capital Partners, KKR, and Tencent. That era ended in August 2025, when Skydance closed its long-negotiated merger with Paramount Global. The combined company, officially styled Paramount, a Skydance Corporation (also referenced in press as Paramount Skydance), folded the CBS broadcast network, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Showtime, Pluto TV, Simon and Schuster's former sibling properties, and the Paramount lot in Hollywood under David Ellison as CEO. Shari Redstone, whose family had controlled Paramount for decades through National Amusements, exited the top of the structure. The new company employs somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 20,000 people, depending on how contractors and production crews are counted, and is publicly traded on Nasdaq. For job seekers, the single most important thing to understand is that Skydance is no longer a boutique. It is the controlling nucleus of one of the last standalone Hollywood majors, and it is in the middle of a top-to-bottom restructuring. That restructuring has been aggressive. Since close, Ellison has reorganized Paramount+, consolidated reporting lines under a smaller group of lieutenants (including Jeff Shell, the former NBCUniversal CEO who now runs the sports division), shut down MTV News and several linear cable operations, renegotiated content deals, and signaled that further layoffs and consolidations are likely through 2026. At the same time, Ellison has been loud about wanting to invest in the areas he cares about: interactive and games (Skydance New Media under Amy Hennig, partnerships with Diablo-franchise veterans, cinematic action-adventure titles), premium animation (Spellbound and the Skydance Animation pipeline that migrated partially from Apple TV+), live sports, and a technology-forward approach to production and distribution. The honest framing for candidates is this: Skydance is simultaneously the fastest-growing employer in legacy Hollywood and the most uncertain one to join. Teams that align with Ellison's stated priorities, particularly interactive, games, animation, sports, and core production technology, are hiring aggressively. Teams tied to declining linear cable, traditional cable news, or overlapping Paramount corporate functions are contracting. The company is headquartered in Santa Monica at the original Skydance building on Colorado Avenue, with major operational centers on the Paramount lot in Hollywood, CBS's Studio City and New York facilities, Nickelodeon Animation in Burbank, Skydance Animation in Madrid (Spain), and Skydance New Media in Southern California. Knowing which division a role sits in, and whether that division is in growth mode or consolidation mode, is the single most important piece of homework before you apply.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Start at skydance

    Start at skydance.com/careers. As of April 2026, that careers page links directly to Skydance's Lever-hosted job board at jobs.lever.co/skydance, which houses openings for the Skydance-origin divisions: Animation (including the Madrid studio), Interactive and Games (Skydance New Media, Amy Hennig's team), Sports, Production, Technology and Pipeline Engineering, and corporate Talent Acquisition. Paramount-origin roles (CBS, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET) are still posted on Paramount's legacy Workday careers portal at careers.paramount.com. Post-merger integration of the two systems has not completed, so it is worth checking both.

  2. 2
    On the Lever board, filter by Department and Location before you start applying

    On the Lever board, filter by Department and Location before you start applying. The openings skew heavily toward Animation (Rigging, Layout, CFX, TD, Pipeline Engineering), Interactive (Engineering, Art, Design, Animation, Marketing), Sports, and a smaller number of Technology and Production roles. Locations cluster in Santa Monica or greater Los Angeles, with Madrid for animation and a New York / New Jersey / Connecticut cluster for sports.

  3. 3
    Click into a specific role

    Click into a specific role. Skydance Lever postings are unusually well written: they include a detailed responsibilities section, a 'what you bring' qualifications section, a salary range (California and New York law require it), an explicit statement that candidates should apply even if they do not meet every requirement, and a recruitment fraud notice. Read the salary range carefully. Skydance posts real ranges, and the spread often signals how senior the hire is expected to be.

  4. 4
    Click Apply for this job

    Click Apply for this job. Lever will open a hosted application form. You can either upload a resume as PDF or Word and let Lever parse it into the form fields, or paste from LinkedIn. The parser is reasonably good but imperfect; always review the parsed output before submitting.

  5. 5
    Fill the standard Lever fields: full name, email, phone, current company, curren

    Fill the standard Lever fields: full name, email, phone, current company, current title, LinkedIn URL, portfolio or reel URL (critical for creative and interactive roles), and location. For animation and interactive roles, a portfolio or demo reel URL is effectively mandatory, even when the form marks it optional.

  6. 6
    Answer the role-specific custom questions

    Answer the role-specific custom questions. Skydance typically asks two to five per posting. Common questions: willingness to work on-site in Santa Monica or Burbank, work authorization status in the United States (or Spain for Madrid), salary expectations, how you heard about Skydance, and for interactive roles, specific tools and engines (Unreal, proprietary, Maya, Houdini, ZBrush) and shipped titles. Answer completely. Lever shows recruiters the exact text you wrote.

  7. 7
    Complete the voluntary self-identification section

    Complete the voluntary self-identification section. United States EEOC demographic questions (gender, race and ethnicity, veteran status, disability status) are legally voluntary and have zero effect on hiring decisions, but do affect Skydance's federal reporting obligations. Spain-based roles use EU-appropriate equivalents.

  8. 8
    Submit and save the confirmation email

    Submit and save the confirmation email. Lever sends an automated receipt from [email protected]. Save it. The legitimate recruiter follow-up will come from an @skydance.com address. Skydance explicitly warns, inside its job postings and on its website, that anyone contacting you from a [email protected] address claiming to represent Skydance recruiting is fraudulent. Do not share banking, passport, or ID information outside the official Lever and Workday portals.

  9. 9
    Expect a fourteen to thirty day initial response window for actively reviewed ro

    Expect a fourteen to thirty day initial response window for actively reviewed roles, with meaningful silence for roles that are paused or redirected as part of the post-merger restructuring. Skydance, like most studios, does not reliably send rejection emails on roles that get canceled or folded into Paramount org changes. Assume no response after forty-five days means move on.

  10. 10
    If you make it past the resume screen, the first human contact is typically a fi

    If you make it past the resume screen, the first human contact is typically a fifteen to thirty minute recruiter phone or video screen through Lever-linked scheduling, followed by a hiring-manager round, followed by department or cross-functional panels. For senior creative and technical roles, expect a portfolio deep-dive or a take-home exercise.

Resume Tips for Skydance

recommended

Front-load shipped, recognizable titles

Front-load shipped, recognizable titles. Skydance is a production company. Hiring managers scan for IMDb-level credits on film, TV, animation, and games work. A bullet that says 'Lead Rigger, feature animation, major studio' is weaker than 'Lead Rigger, Spellbound (Skydance Animation, 2024)' or 'Senior Gameplay Engineer, God of War Ragnarok (Sony Santa Monica, 2022).' Name the project, your role, the studio, and the year. Lever surfaces this directly to the recruiter.

recommended

Tailor the top third of your resume to the exact division

Tailor the top third of your resume to the exact division. An Interactive (games) application should open with engines, shipped titles, and platform experience. An Animation application should open with your reel URL, pipeline tools (Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Katana, proprietary), and show credits. A Sports application should open with live-production experience, control room roles, and named rightsholders (NFL, CBS Sports, college football). Generic 'media professional' framing is punished.

recommended

Include your portfolio or reel URL in the header, not just as a Lever form field

Include your portfolio or reel URL in the header, not just as a Lever form field. Make the link clickable in the PDF and, separately, password-protect or gate anything that is NDA-covered. Use Vimeo or a personal domain. Do not use raw Dropbox folder links, which break in ATS parsers and in recruiter browsers.

recommended

Quantify business and craft impact

Quantify business and craft impact. Interactive engineers should cite frame rate, platform ship volume, live-ops player counts, or engine migration scope. Production and development executives should cite budgets, greenlights, development slate size, and revenue or viewership. Animation leads should cite crew size, shot count, and episode or feature counts. Vague leadership language gets filtered out.

recommended

Use an ATS-safe template

Use an ATS-safe template. Lever parses cleanly from single-column resumes with standard section headers (Experience, Education, Skills, Portfolio). Two-column creative resumes, text boxes, and graphics frequently misparse into the wrong fields. This matters because recruiters at a company the size of post-merger Paramount Skydance search Lever and Workday using structured field data.

recommended

Mirror the exact tools and terminology in the posting

Mirror the exact tools and terminology in the posting. If the Skydance New Media posting specifies Unreal Engine 5, mention Unreal Engine 5 explicitly, not just 'proprietary engines.' If the Animation posting calls for USD pipeline experience, use the phrase USD pipeline. Lever's search-by-keyword feature is how recruiters build shortlists.

recommended

Keep the resume to one page for anything under ten years of experience, two page

Keep the resume to one page for anything under ten years of experience, two pages for senior and executive roles, and never more than two pages regardless of tenure. Hollywood norms are tighter than tech norms on length.

recommended

Include a short, specific summary line at the top that names the division and ro

Include a short, specific summary line at the top that names the division and role category, not a generic objective. Example: 'Senior Technical Animator targeting Skydance Animation feature pipeline roles, eight shipped features, Maya and Houdini expert, shipped in Madrid and Los Angeles studios.' This is the line Lever shows recruiters above the fold.

recommended

Address location clearly

Address location clearly. Skydance is running a predominantly on-site culture in Santa Monica, Burbank, the Paramount lot, and Madrid. Remote roles are rare and usually explicit in the posting. If you are not currently local, state your willingness and timeline to relocate in the summary or in the Lever custom question.

recommended

Do not hide gaps, but do contextualize them

Do not hide gaps, but do contextualize them. Post-2023 Hollywood has been through a writers and actors strike, consolidation layoffs at Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and Netflix, and the ongoing games industry contraction. Recruiters at Skydance have lived through all of it and read gaps sympathetically when they are labeled.

ATS System: Lever (for Skydance-origin roles) and Workday (for Paramount-origin roles)

Skydance-origin openings, meaning roles attached to Skydance Animation, Skydance New Media, Skydance Sports, Skydance Interactive, and corporate functions that existed before the merger, are posted on Lever at jobs.lever.co/skydance. Lever is a modern, clean, recruiter-facing ATS that parses standard PDF and Word resumes well, supports portfolio and reel URL fields natively, and routes applications directly into recruiter pipelines with clear stage tracking. Paramount-origin openings, meaning CBS, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, and Showtime roles, remain on Paramount's legacy Workday instance at careers.paramount.com. Workday is a larger, more structured enterprise ATS with more form fields and a more rigid keyword-matching approach. As of April 2026, the two systems have not been consolidated. Expect that consolidation to happen during 2026, likely onto Workday given Paramount's scale, but do not count on it during your current application cycle.

  • For Lever, upload a single-column PDF. Lever's parser reliably extracts contact information, titles, companies, dates, and skills from clean PDFs and struggles with multi-column creative layouts.
  • For Lever, fill the portfolio or reel URL field even if it is marked optional. Recruiters filter by that field's presence for creative and interactive roles.
  • For Workday (Paramount-origin roles), expect to manually retype most of your work history into structured fields even after uploading a resume. Budget thirty to forty-five minutes per Workday application.
  • Use exact keyword matches from the posting. Both Lever and Workday match on tokens: if the posting says 'Unreal Engine 5,' write 'Unreal Engine 5,' not 'UE5' alone.
  • Both systems send no-reply confirmation emails. Legitimate recruiter follow-up comes from @skydance.com or, for Paramount-origin roles, @paramount.com, @cbs.com, @mtvnetworks.com, or @nick.com. Anything else is a recruitment-fraud impersonation attempt, which Skydance explicitly warns candidates about inside every Lever posting.
  • Do not submit the same resume to multiple Skydance divisions hoping for the best. Recruiters see cross-applications and read generic resumes as a negative signal. Tailor per division, and give the Lever application enough time to be reviewed before applying to a second role.

Interview Culture

Skydance interviews look like Hollywood interviews with a serious technology and craft overlay.

For creative roles (animation, design, interactive art, live-action production), expect the portfolio or reel to be the center of gravity. You will be asked to walk through specific shots, scenes, or shipped titles and explain your individual contribution, the constraints you worked inside, what you would do differently, and what you learned. Be prepared to talk credit honestly: Hollywood recruiters assume collaboration and are suspicious of candidates who claim sole ownership of team outputs. For technical roles (pipeline engineering, gameplay engineering, tools, production technology), expect a mix of systems-design conversation, live or take-home coding exercises in the relevant language and engine, and deep discussion of shipped production challenges. Skydance's Pipeline Engineering team, which supports the Animation and feature production pipeline, is known for asking hard questions about scalability across hundreds of artists, USD pipelines, and render-farm throughput. Skydance New Media, under Amy Hennig, recruits from the AAA narrative-action lineage (Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica, Visceral) and expects candidates to be conversant in single-player, story-driven design philosophy, not live-service. For corporate and development roles (business and legal affairs, finance, strategy, marketing), expect case-style conversation about the media landscape and specific questions about the post-merger roadmap: streaming strategy for Paramount+, international rights, games strategy, sports rights renewal, and cost structure. Across all tracks, interviewers tend to ask directly about ability to handle ambiguity, because the company is actively being rebuilt around Ellison's vision. Candidates who perform best are specific about past work, realistic about tradeoffs, and visibly comfortable with the idea that the organization they join in 2026 will not look the same in 2027. The interview pipeline typically runs four to six rounds over three to six weeks for individual contributor roles, and can stretch to eight or more rounds and two to three months for senior creative, engineering leadership, and executive roles. On-site final rounds happen at the Santa Monica HQ, the Paramount lot in Hollywood, the Skydance Animation studio in Madrid, or the Skydance New Media offices, depending on the role.

What Skydance Looks For

  • Shipped work. Skydance is a production company run by producers. Nothing on your resume carries more weight than a named, recognizable, recently shipped credit in film, TV, animation, or games.
  • Craft depth in your specific discipline. Breadth is fine for executives; for ICs, interviewers want to see obsessive fluency in a specific toolset, pipeline, engine, or creative vocabulary.
  • Comfort with ambiguity and change. The company is being restructured in real time. Candidates who are allergic to uncertainty will struggle.
  • Alignment with Ellison's stated priorities: premium animation, story-driven games, technology-forward production, live sports, and a rebuilt Paramount+ streaming strategy.
  • Collaboration and ego calibration. Hollywood and AAA games both run on credit sharing and long-running relationships. Interviewers are trained to read for candidates who will litigate credit later.
  • Business literacy. Even for deeply creative roles, candidates who understand budgets, windows, release strategy, and the post-merger economics of streaming and theatrical outperform candidates who do not.
  • On-site availability in Santa Monica, Burbank, the Paramount lot, Madrid, or the New York and Connecticut sports cluster. Remote is the exception.
  • Evidence of judgment under constraint: shipping on time and on budget, managing a team through a strike or layoff cycle, shipping a game through a platform transition, or running a production through a writers room change.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Skydance the same company as Paramount now?
Yes, as of August 2025. The combined entity is officially Paramount, a Skydance Corporation (often shortened in press to Paramount Skydance). David Ellison, Skydance's founder, is CEO of the combined company, and Skydance is the controlling parent. For career purposes, Skydance-origin businesses (Animation, Interactive/Games, Sports, and the original Skydance Film and TV slate) still post on Lever under the Skydance brand, while Paramount-origin businesses (CBS, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, Showtime) still post on Workday under the Paramount brand.
Where is Skydance headquartered?
Skydance's corporate headquarters is in Santa Monica, California, on Colorado Avenue. Post-merger, the combined company also operates major facilities on the Paramount lot in Hollywood, CBS facilities in Studio City and New York, Nickelodeon Animation in Burbank, Skydance Animation in Madrid, and Skydance New Media offices in Southern California.
What ATS does Skydance use?
Lever, at jobs.lever.co/skydance, for Skydance-origin roles including Animation, Interactive and Games (Skydance New Media), Sports, and Technology. The Paramount side of the house uses Workday at careers.paramount.com. As of April 2026, these have not been consolidated, and both are live.
How many people work at Paramount Skydance?
Roughly 15,000 to 20,000 depending on how production crew, show-specific contractors, and part-time talent are counted. Pre-merger Skydance employed about 1,500 people directly. Paramount Global employed over 20,000 before the merger close and before Ellison's announced layoffs, many of which are still rolling through the organization in 2026.
Is Skydance a good place to work right now?
Honest answer: it depends heavily on which division you join. Animation, games (Skydance New Media with Amy Hennig), sports, and core production technology are expanding with serious investment and Ellison's personal attention. Linear cable, MTV News, overlapping Paramount corporate functions, and some Paramount+ teams are contracting. Ask in your interviews where the specific team sits in the post-merger roadmap. That answer will tell you more than any Glassdoor review.
What divisions does Skydance operate?
Skydance-origin divisions are Film, Television, Animation (with studios in Los Angeles and Madrid), Interactive and Games (Skydance New Media under Amy Hennig, plus Skydance Interactive), and Sports (under former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell). Post-merger, the combined company adds CBS (network and sports), Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, Paramount Global Content Distribution, MTV Entertainment Studios, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Showtime, and Pluto TV, among others.
Does Skydance hire remote?
Rarely. The default is on-site at Santa Monica, Burbank, the Paramount lot, Madrid, or the New York and Connecticut sports cluster, depending on the role. A small number of engineering and post-production roles are hybrid. Individual Lever postings will say explicitly. If a posting does not say remote or hybrid, assume on-site.
What should I put in my portfolio or reel for Skydance?
For animation, three to five minutes of your strongest shipped work, shot breakdown slate on each, named productions, your specific role and contribution, most recent work first. For interactive and games, shipped titles with your role, plus optional personal or in-engine demos. For live-action production, a selects reel of named shows with your credit. For interactive art and design, a dedicated portfolio site with case studies, not just images. Use Vimeo, a personal domain, or ArtStation. Avoid raw Dropbox or Google Drive links.
How long does the Skydance hiring process take?
Typically four to six weeks from first recruiter contact to offer for individual contributor roles, and two to three months for senior creative, engineering leadership, and executive roles. The post-merger restructuring has slowed some pipelines because teams are being reorganized mid-process. If a role goes quiet after a strong early interview, it is more likely to be an org-chart reason than a candidate-performance reason.
Is Skydance New Media hiring?
Yes, on a targeted basis. Amy Hennig's team ships single-player, narrative, cinematic action-adventure games in the lineage of Uncharted and Star Wars Jedi. Openings appear on the Skydance Lever board under Interactive (Engineering, Art, Animation, Design, Marketing). These roles are highly competitive and typically require shipped AAA credits. Skydance also has an older Skydance Interactive VR studio, which has been smaller and quieter post-merger.
What should I know about David Ellison before interviewing?
David Ellison founded Skydance in 2010, funded initially by his father Larry Ellison's fortune. He has been personally involved in greenlighting and producing Top Gun: Maverick, the Mission: Impossible franchise, and much of Skydance's animation and games strategy. He is now CEO of the combined Paramount Skydance. Interviewers will not expect you to quote his biography, but understanding that the company is founder-led, aggressive about technology and IP, and willing to restructure hard will help you frame answers about ambiguity, speed, and priorities.
What is the biggest risk of joining Skydance right now?
Organizational churn. The merger closed in August 2025, and the integration is still actively underway in 2026. Roles can be reorganized, leadership can change, and divisions can be consolidated between offer and start date. Mitigate this by asking directly in your interviews about the post-merger roadmap for your specific team, who your skip-level would be, and what has changed on the team in the last six months. Candidates who ask these questions are read as serious, not as skeptical.

Open Positions

Skydance currently has 31 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 31 open positions at Skydance

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Sources

  1. Skydance Careers (official) —
  2. Skydance job board on Lever (verified live, 33 active postings April 2026) —
  3. Paramount Careers (Workday, Paramount-origin roles) —
  4. Skydance Animation (Madrid and Los Angeles studios) —
  5. Skydance New Media (Amy Hennig's studio) —
  6. Skydance Sports —
  7. Paramount Global and Skydance Media merger close announcement (August 2025) —
  8. Skydance recruitment fraud alert (embedded in every Lever posting) —