# Sebastian De Ro

> Sebastian De Ro is an Austrian software engineer and the co-founder and CTO of Magic, the AI company he started with former Vienna schoolmate Eric Steinberger in 2022. His career spans enterprise software leadership at FireStart and Magic’s research into long-context systems for software engineering.

- **Role:** Co-founder and CTO at Magic
- **Organizations:** Magic, FireStart, ClimateScience, twinformatics, Automic Software
- **Nationality:** Austrian
- **Education:** Higher technical school, informatics, HTL Spengergasse, Vienna
- **Known for:** Co-founded Magic in 2022 with Eric Steinberger., Led technology at FireStart, where the product development organization grew to 25 people across four disciplines, according to his own account., Helped build FireStart Cloud during his CTO tenure, according to a public colleague recommendation.

## Career timeline

- **2013-2018** — Studied informatics at HTL Spengergasse in Vienna and participated in its gifted-student program.
- **2017** — Worked at Automic Software.
- **2018-2019** — Worked in software development at twinformatics.
- **2019-2022** — Advanced to CTO at FireStart and helped build its next-generation cloud platform.
- **2022** — Co-founded Magic with Eric Steinberger.
- **2024** — Magic announced LTM-2-mini and a reported 100 million token context window.
- **2026** — Magic published a company research update on compute-efficient pretraining.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Magic in 2022 with Eric Steinberger.
- Led technology at FireStart, where the product development organization grew to 25 people across four disciplines, according to his own account.
- Helped build FireStart Cloud during his CTO tenure, according to a public colleague recommendation.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Magic published a research update reporting more compute-efficient pretraining; the post was attributed to the Magic team.
- **2024-08** — Magic announced its LTM-2-mini model with a reported 100 million token context window and a $320 million investment.

## Links

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastiandero/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/SebastianDeRo
- GitHub: https://github.com/sebastiandero

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/sebastian-de-ro
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29