Senior Quality & Release Engineer

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.

Catch problems before an editor loses time or work.

Why this role matters

Wizard is built alongside working editors at Story. They use it on real projects with real deadlines, and our paid beta brings that responsibility to outside studios. Every combination of media, effects, timeline operations, and agent actions is something we have to verify.

Professional editors need dependable software. We're hiring a senior engineer to own quality engineering and release qualification, helping us find problems earlier and keep repaired behavior covered as the product changes.

About the role

You'll join our Pipeline team, which builds and improves the systems that let Wizard develop, test, ship, and scale. You'll work with Charles Harris III and our engineering team to extend Athanor, our agent-driven desktop testing system. You'll build coverage around real projects, investigate failures, and make the evidence useful to the people fixing them.

You'll own release qualification, working with DevOps on build and delivery infrastructure and with Logan Kurtz, our Technical Program Manager, on release readiness.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll write automation, debug difficult failures, and use exploratory testing where it gives us information automation misses.

What you'll do

• Run and extend Athanor, covering editing, media, effects, project persistence, and exports.

• Triage findings, distinguish application defects from harness or environment problems, and give actionable findings an owner and next step.

• Turn customer reports into reproduction attempts and verified regression cases. Retain useful evidence when a problem cannot yet be reproduced.

• Build and maintain a representative library of projects and reference outputs, and check frame timing, image quality, color, and audio against them with appropriate tolerances.

• Validate ingest across the camera and interchange formats our customers use.

• Write evals that check whether Oz completes multistep edits while preserving project state, editability, and Undo.

• Qualify packaged builds and release candidates, and communicate what passed, what failed, and what remains uncertain.

• Use crash and performance evidence to identify recurring problems and verify repairs, partnering with DevOps and application engineers on instrumentation.

• Develop and evaluate better ways to use agents for testing, reproduction, and diagnosis. Measure their effect on defect detection, investigation time, and coverage.

What you bring

• Experience testing video, media, graphics, games, or another application where timing and output correctness matter.

• Strong automation skills in Python or C++, with experience integrating tests into CI.

• Debugging depth: you can narrow a failure to a codec, GPU path, timeline operation, fixture, or environment.

• Experience qualifying desktop releases and making clear recommendations from incomplete or conflicting evidence.

• An eye and ear for media problems, and the judgment to choose useful automated comparisons.

• The ability to explain what failed, what the evidence proves, and what should happen next.

Experience with Qt, camera formats such as R3D, BRAW, ProRes RAW, and MXF, interchange such as XML, EDL, and AAF, or agent evaluation would be useful.

Show us what you've built

A test framework, a difficult regression you caught, a release process you improved, or a failure investigation that changed how a team worked. Hands-on editing, color, sound, or production experience is also valuable.

We welcome different backgrounds. We care about what you've caught, what you've automated, and how you reason about risk.

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.

Compensation

The base salary range for this role is $200,000 – $260,000. Your final offer will depend on your experience, skills and level.