Systems Engineer, Wizard Headless

Wizard Studios; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Wizard Studios seeks a senior systems engineer to extract the core engine from the editor and build a stable API layer for WizReview and future apps. You will separate runtime from the UI, ship a CLI that renders projects without a UI, and design a hosted render and edit API for scalable use across products.

You will collaborate with media, color, audio, and AI teams to optimize performance for large projects, memory, concurrency, and GPU pipelines, ensuring robust API design and AI-assisted

Qualifications

• Proficient in production C++ and comfortable with Rust or similar.
• Experience with GPU-based rendering, compute, or media processing.

Responsibilities

• Pull the core runtime out of the app: project state, commands, history, playback, and rendering.
• Ship a CLI that opens a .wiz project and renders end-to-end with no UI.
• Design the hosted render and edit API, then scale it.
• Define the plugin boundary to protect project state from extensions.
• Improve large project performance: memory layout, caching, concurrency, and GPU pipelines.
• Profile and fix production issues in edit bays, often the same day.

Skills

C++

Rust

API design

Memory management

Concurrency

Tools

FFmpeg

Apple AVFoundation

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.

Turn Wizard into an engine: a CLI and hosted API that every Wizard product builds on.

Why this role matters

Wizard Headless is the engine under everything we're building next: WizReview, a modular front end people can extend, plugins that can't break what's underneath, custom pipelines for studios like ILM and Disney, new apps on a hosted runtime, and WizBox on set. Today the core still lives inside the editor app. You'll help pull it out and give it a clean, stable API that people and models can build on.

About the role

You'll work with Sam Mills, our Founding Video Engine Lead, in our native C++ codebase. You'll separate the runtime from the UI, build the CLI that renders and edits projects with no interface at all, and design the hosted render and edit API that WizReview and future apps call. You'll work closely with our media pipeline, color, audio, and AI leads.

What you'll do

• Pull the core runtime out of the app: project state, commands, history, playback, and rendering.

• Ship a CLI that opens a .wiz project and renders it end to end with no UI.

• Design the hosted render and edit API, then scale it.

• Define the plugin boundary so extensions and vibe-coded tools can't corrupt project state.

• Make large projects fast: memory layout, caching, concurrency, and GPU pipelines.

• Profile and fix production issues found in Story's edit bays, often the same day.

What you bring

• Systems languages: production C++ (and comfort in Rust or similar), shipped in performance-sensitive native software.

• GPU pipelines: you've built or optimized rendering, compute, or media processing on the GPU.

• API design: you've designed interfaces other teams and outside developers depended on.

• 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.

Show us what you can do

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

• A media engine, renderer, or runtime you built or substantially owned (for example at Blackmagic, Apple AVFoundation, Netflix encoding, Mux, or Remotion).

• Core contributions to FFmpeg or similar media libraries.

• Systems you made dramatically faster, with the measurements to show it.

You do not need a backend title. We care about what you can build, how you think, and the decisions you can defend.

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.