Wizard Studios Inc is building an AI-native platform for creative work, centered on a native C++ editor and a headless media runtime used by humans, agents, and developers. In this onsite role in San Francisco, you will focus on Wizard’s user-facing interface in C++ and Qt, delivering timeline and panel experiences that stay responsive on large projects while incorporating rapid feedback from story editors.
You will join the second front-end engineering role and work closely with Jack Gardner, Head of Product, who built much of the interface himself. Your contributions will help keep product momentum while improving interaction performance, UI modularity, and feature quality through planning, testing, review, and release.
Responsibilities
- Build the timeline, panels, and viewers in C++ and Qt, primarily using Qt Widgets and custom-painted components, with QML where it fits.
- Make interactions feel instant on large projects through painting, caching, and overall responsiveness.
- Ship weekly improvements driven by Story editors’ feedback.
- Own moderately scoped features end-to-end, from implementation planning through testing, code review, and release.
- Create reusable UI building blocks, including widgets, controls, themes, and desktop interaction patterns, as the UI becomes modular on Wizard Headless.
- Debug issues across widget, painting, QML, and application-logic layers, and write tests.
Requirements
- Production C++ experience: at least three years of professional C++ development, including at least one shipped desktop application. Qt experience isn’t required, but you will work in it daily and should be able to get fluent quickly.
- Experience with complex, stateful UI connected to application state, data models, and services (not only forms or dashboards).
- Ability to build custom UI that stays fast, including custom-drawn controls or views in any toolkit (Qt, AppKit, JUCE, ImGui, or a game engine’s UI) while keeping performance strong with real data loads.
- Practical craft in usability and interaction design, including visual hierarchy and consistency, plus the judgement to fill in the details a mock leaves out.
- Creative drive: making things outside of work and caring about how tools look and feel.
- Video editing fluency with hands-on experience in Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, or similar creative applications.
Technologies
- C++
- Qt (Qt Widgets, QML)
- Qt painting
- AppKit, JUCE, ImGui
- Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro
What You’ll Show
- Production interfaces you built in C++ and/or Qt, with clear details on your individual contribution, especially dense interaction-heavy work like timelines, editors, or node graphs.
- Experience building software for pro creative workflows, including companies such as Blackmagic, Apple Pro Apps, Foundry (Nuke), Autodesk, Ableton, Maxon, or similar.
- Public source code is not required; what matters is what you built, the decisions you made, and how it worked for users.
- Equivalent professional experience is valued in place of a specific degree. Nice-to-have areas include cross-platform desktop work, Qt painting and QML profiling, custom rendering, media playback, accessibility, or localization.
About Wizard Studios Inc
Wizard is the AI-native platform for creative work, starting with professional video through a native C++ editor and a headless media runtime that supports humans, agents, and developers. The team built a native C++ editor and headless media runtime within roughly six months, and Wizard’s agent workflow is designed so every change remains inspectable, editable, and reversible.
Work is performed in person in San Francisco. Wizard is developing with a creative-as-code philosophy: decisions stay controllable and composable, with emphasis on artist integrity and taste over throughput.