Audio Engine Engineer

Wizard is a new creative software company building professional tools for filmmakers, editors, and visual storytellers. We're a small founding team backed by people who've built and scaled creative software before. Wizard is being built inside a working film studio, Story ((Use the "Apply for this Job" box below).). Our editors and filmmakers are down the hall. Every architectural decision gets pressure-tested against real projects within weeks, not quarters.

San Francisco Bay Area. On-site. Full-time.

You own everything that makes sound in the editor — playback, mixing, levels, sync, metering, effects processing, waveform display, multi-channel output, and the interchange pipeline that round-trips to Pro Tools. Audio in a video editor is the thing nobody notices until it's wrong. If the mix clips, the sync drifts, or the meters lie, every editor in the building hears it immediately.

You make sure that doesn't happen, at any track count, in real time.

• Real-time audio mixing engine — gain staging, bus routing, aux sends, and insert chains across 24+ tracks playing back with video
• Low-latency playback system with configurable buffer sizes and hardware audio interface integration (ASIO, Core Audio, WASAPI)
• Audio effects pipeline — EQ, compression, noise reduction, and a hosting architecture for VST/AU plugins
• Waveform rendering and metering — LUFS, peak, VU, with frame-accurate display on the timeline
• Audio-to-video sync engine — Plural Eyes-style automatic sync from external recorders, drift correction on long clips
• Multi-channel and surround sound support — stereo, 5.1, 7.1, channel mapping and downmix
• OMF/AAF export for Pro Tools round-trip — editors cut picture, then hand off clean audio sessions to dedicated mix engineers

• Built or significantly contributed to a real-time audio engine — a DAW, game audio system, or broadcast audio pipeline
• Low-latency audio programming experience with strict buffer-callback timing constraints
• Multi-channel audio and hardware interface integration (not just stereo web audio)
• Understanding of professional audio interchange — OMF, AAF, and how editorial audio moves to a mix stage

• Have only worked with the Web Audio API — the performance model and latency constraints are fundamentally different
• Are a music producer or sound designer who uses audio tools but hasn't built one at the systems level
• Have no experience with real-time constraints — batch audio processing or offline rendering doesn't apply here
• Can't explain the relationship between buffer size, sample rate, and latency