Forward Deployed Engineer

Wizard Studios; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Wizard, Inc. seeks a technically versatile engineer to work closely with editors and studios. You will own customer accounts from onboarding to ongoing success, fix critical issues quickly, and build integration work for studio pipelines using the Wizard Headless CLI.

Strong product judgment and AI-assisted engineering experience are valued to align software with real post-production needs. You will contribute to features and workflows on tight one-day release cycles, turning customer feedback

Qualifications

• Experience in post-production including editing or color work.
• Strong product judgment with evidence-based decision making.
• Solid software fundamentals: memory, concurrency, data structures, design.
• Experience using AI coding tools to build software.
• Ability to understand users and connect tech choices to workflows.
• Ownership mindset: drive work from start to finish after launch.

Responsibilities

• Own customer accounts end to end: onboarding, delivery, adoption, success.
• Fix P0 issues quickly and document root causes for long-term resilience.
• Build pipeline glue for studio customers via Wizard Headless CLI.
• Develop features and integrations with rapid, one-day cycles.
• Decide what to build and what not to build based on user impact.
• Turn customer project lessons into broad product improvements.

Skills

Post-production experience

Strong product judgment

Software fundamentals

AI-assisted engineering

User understanding

Ownership

Story/film workflow familiarity

Tools

C++

Wizard Headless CLI

Memory management

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.

Sit in the edit bay, fix what breaks the same day, and turn every fix into product.

Why this role matters

Our customers are editors and studios working to deadlines. Wizard reached 91% parity with Premiere and Resolve in six months by forward-deploying into Story's edit bays, and our paid private beta is now onboarding outside teams. Forward deployed engineers live inside customer pipelines, fix what breaks the same day, and make sure the next customer needs less. We're hiring three.

About the role

We're looking for technical generalists who can work with editors, understand their needs, and build solutions that improve their work. You could be a software engineer with strong product sense, or a product-minded builder with strong engineering skills. You'll report to Aryan Kapoor, who leads our paid beta. Our core stack is in C++.

What you'll do

• Own customer accounts end to end: onboarding, delivery, adoption, and ongoing success, starting with Story and our paid beta seats.

• Fix P0 issues within hours, not weeks, and write the root cause into the backlog so it never comes back.

• Build custom pipeline glue for studio customers, on the Wizard Headless CLI as it lands.

• Build and ship features, integrations, and workflow improvements on one-day cycles.

• Decide what to build, but more importantly, what not to build.

• Turn lessons from customer projects into improvements for all users.

What you bring

• Time in post: you've cut, colored, mixed, or otherwise worked in post-production yourself.

• Strong product judgment: you define what success looks like, test your assumptions, and use evidence to decide what to build.

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

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

• User understanding: you ask good questions, uncover the real problem, and connect technical choices to how people work.

• Ownership: you move work forward independently and follow through after launch.

Show us what you can do

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

• User-facing software you built that people actively use.

• A portfolio that shows technical skill, product judgment, and attention to detail.

• Deep experience in an area of filmmaking (editing, sound, color, cinematography, or visual effects) combined with the technical skills to build software.

You do not need a previous forward deployed engineering title. We care about what you can build, how you think, and how well you understand users.

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.