Distributed Systems Engineer
Wizard
Distributed Systems Engineer
Wizard
Develops GPU-accelerated AI editing suite
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The base salary range for this role is $200,000 – $260,000. Your final offer will depend on your experience, skills and level.
Wizard is a software development company that is building a new creative suite for photo and video editors. Its product is editing software engineered for modern hardware and AI applications, optimized to leverage GPU compute and unified memory architectures, with first-class access to the editing timeline for AI features. This differentiates Wizard from existing tools not designed for today’s hardware and AI workloads. The company targets professional video editors and operates with a lean team in San Francisco. The overall goal is to provide a capable, efficient workflow for content creation tasks through a tightly integrated AI-enabled editing experience.
Explore more opportunities at Wizard