Distributed Systems Engineer, Wizlink

Wizard Studios; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Wizard is seeking a lead/second engineer to own Wizlink end-to-end, designing the sync and data model for .wiz project state and shipping cloud projects for team collaboration. You will work with cross-functional teams on Wizard Headless, the .wiz format, and WizReview.

Responsibilities include building a multiplayer-ready data model, enabling real-time collaboration, and ensuring reliability and recoverability.

Qualifications

• Shipping real-time sync or collaboration used daily.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, CRDTs or OT, and failure modes.
• Strong memory management, concurrency, data structures, and system design.

Responsibilities

• Design a multiplayer-ready data model for timelines, graphs, and media references.
• Ship Cloud Share: host, share, and open projects across a team.
• Turn on real-time multiplayer with CRDTs or better approaches.
• Build dynamic links between cloud projects and local media without blocking edits.
• Plan migration for moving single-player projects to multiplayer.
• Own reliability: observability, conflict handling, and recovery when network drops.

Skills

Multiplayer sync design

Distributed systems

CS fundamentals

C++/client

AI-assisted engineering

Job description

Wizard is the AI-native platform for creative work, starting with professional video: a native C++ editor and headless media runtime that humans, agents, and developers all operate.

Build Google Workspace and GitHub for video: cloud projects any team can open, share, and edit together.

Why this role matters

Wizard is local-first: media stays on the editor's machine and playback never waits on a connection. But creative work is a team sport. Wizlink is our cloud layer: hosted projects, dynamic links, and shared editing that feels like Google Workspace and GitHub, built for video. The plan is to decide the data model once and ship twice: make it multiplayer-ready now, ship Cloud Share on it, then turn on real-time multiplayer. We're hiring a lead and a second engineer.

About the role

You'll own Wizlink end to end. You'll design the sync and data model for .wiz project state, ship cloud projects to Story's team, then turn on CRDT multiplayer. You'll work hand in hand with Sam Mills on Wizard Headless and Harry Pal on the open .wiz format, and with our web engineers on WizReview.

What you'll do

• Design a multiplayer-ready data model for timelines, graphs, and media references.

• Ship Cloud Share: host, share, and open projects across a team.

• Turn on real-time multiplayer with CRDTs, or something better suited to timelines and graphs.

• Build dynamic links between cloud projects and local media without blocking the edit.

• Plan migration so single-player projects move to multiplayer cleanly.

• Own reliability: observability, conflict handling, and recovery when a network drops mid-session.

What you bring

• Production sync experience: you've shipped real-time sync or collaboration that people used every day.

• Distributed systems depth: consistency models, replication, CRDTs or OT, and failure modes, from first principles.

• Deep software fundamentals: memory management, concurrency, data structures, and system design. You can defend the engineering decisions you make.

• Comfort across languages: C++ on the client, plus a systems language such as Rust or Go for services.

• AI-assisted engineering: deep experience using AI coding tools to build and ship software.

Show us what you can do

We welcome different backgrounds. Evidence of a strong fit could include:

• Multiplayer or sync systems you built at Figma, Linear, Notion, Ink & Switch (Automerge), LucidLink, Dropbox, or a company like them.

• Local-first apps, collaborative editors, version control, or game netcode.

• A design doc or postmortem you wrote that changed how a system was built.

You do not need a distributed systems title. We care about what you've built and how you reason about failure.

About Wizard

Every so often, a new technology redefines how stories get told: the printing press, the telephone, radio, the film camera, the cutting room, television, the digital camera, non-linear editing. We think we're at the start of the next one, and we intend to build the company that defines it.

Wizard is the AI-native platform for creative work, starting with the hardest creative workflow: professional video. In roughly six months, our team built a native C++ editor and a headless media runtime that humans, agents, and developers all operate. Oz, our agent, ingests footage at roughly 300× real time and edits at 30–60× real time, and every change it makes stays inspectable, editable, and reversible.

Our philosophy is creative as code: every decision editable, controllable, composable, never generative slop you regenerate and hope for the best. Controllability over convenience. Artist integrity over automation. Taste over throughput.

Our sister company is Story, a production company making video for frontier AI labs and deep-tech companies. We work closely with them: Story is our first customer and in-house design partner, and its editors cut real client work on Wizard every day.

Our team comes from Industrial Light & Magic, Netflix, Apple, Epic Games, Lucasfilm, Blizzard, and 2K. We work in person in San Francisco.