Live Streaming Production Manager

Midwest Cards is a specialty sports and trading card retailer in Columbus, Ohio. We run a physical store, a growing ecommerce business, and a live selling Breaker team on Whatnot and Fanatics Live. We're an authorized reseller for Topps/Fanatics and Upper Deck, and we sell to everyone from the kid buying a first pack to the collector chasing a specific card.

Live selling is the fastest-moving part of this business, and most of it looks the same: one camera, one table, one person opening packs and reading names off a board. It works, and it has a low ceiling. The next era of live selling belongs to whoever treats it as programming instead of a webcam with a checkout button.

That's the job.

The Live Streaming Production Manager owns every frame Midwest Cards puts on air. You are the executive producer, creative director, and technical lead for our live channels — accountable for what the shows are, how they look, how they run, and whether people stay to watch.

This is not a stream-operator job. We are not hiring someone to hit go-live and hand the room to the talent. We're hiring the person who decides that Tuesday night is a different show than Saturday afternoon, who builds the formats, designs the set, cuts the cameras, writes the segments, and sends talent on air with a plan. Sales follow the show.

Your job is the show.

You build the schedule the way a network builds one — distinct shows with their own identity, hosts, pacing, and reason to tune in.

• Create and maintain a weekly programming grid across Whatnot, Fanatics Live, and any channel we add, with each slot built for the audience actually watching at that hour
• Develop original show formats, recurring segments, and franchise bits that give viewers something to come back for beyond the next break
• Write and run the run-of-show for every broadcast: cold open, segment order, beat-by-beat timing, planned moments, clean out
• Build tentpole programming around the release calendar, hobby events, holidays, and store moments — including multi-hour and multi-host specials
• Develop competition, game, and reveal mechanics that make watching entertaining whether or not the viewer is buying that night
• Maintain a format pipeline: pitch, pilot, measure, keep or kill

Someone should be able to land on our stream with the sound off and know it's us.

• Own the on-air visual identity: set design, staging, backdrop, product presentation, and the physical space the shows live in
• Design and maintain the graphics package — lower thirds, break boards, odds and price cards, countdowns, transitions, stingers, replay wipes, hit reveals
• Direct lighting design for a room that has to look good on camera for eight hours straight, not just at 7 p.m.
• Build a camera language: angles, coverage, close-ups on the card, overheads on the rip, macro on the hit, and the cuts that make a pull land
• Own audio as a first-class discipline — mics, mix, music beds, and sound design that carries energy without burying the host
• Keep the visual system consistent across channels and clips so the show feeds social, and social feeds the show

You are in the chair when the light is on.

• Direct shows live: switching, camera calls, graphics triggers, audio cues, replays, and the judgment to throw out the rundown when something better is happening
• Produce the on-air talent — prep them before the show, talk to them during it, give notes after it, and develop their on-camera range over time
• Cast and rotate hosts and guests; build chemistry pairings and know which personality fits which format
• Own the technical stack end to end: cameras, switchers, encoders, capture, streaming software, control surfaces, network redundancy, and…