Software Engineer, Product

Product engineering at Descript means owning outcomes, not just tickets — you'll take a problem from a rough idea to a shipped, measured result, working closely with product, design, and the rest of engineering along the way. We organize around a few teams, each responsible for a distinct part of the product: Editor, Growth & Monetization, Media, and AI. Regardless of your team you’ll have the opportunity to design thoughtful full-stack systems that work reliably and deliver value to new and existing users.

• Own meaningful product surfaces end to end, from definition through design, implementation, launch, measurement, and maintenance.
• Shape the product, not just the implementation, by partnering with Product and Design to propose better interactions, expose constraints, choose the right metrics, and find simpler paths to user outcomes.
• Build ambitious full-stack systems with care, stretching from TypeScript and React to NodeJS and Temporal to first and third party integrations.
• Improve how the team learns and ships by forming hypotheses, instrumenting your work, releasing incrementally, and reading results honestly.
• Raise the team’s technical ambition through architectural direction, thoughtful reviews, mentoring, and clear human writing.

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping customer-facing products, including end-to-end features that measurably improved user or business outcomes.
• Effectively leverage agents to multiply impact and think critically about how to better harness AI in your work.
• Owned features/experiments end to end, from planning through launch, and leveraged analytics and metrics to evaluate impact.
• Orient quickly in unfamiliar systems by exploring and asking thoughtful questions to both teammates and agents.
• Care about how software feels and notice when the technically correct result is still wrong for the user.
• Create clarity in ambiguous work and navigate (and simplify) significant product and technical complexity.
• Validate work rigorously through focused reproductions, logs, tests, and other evidence rather than trusting that the output looks right.

• Similar Products: Work on an editor, media product, creative tool, or payment system (like Stripe).
• Our Stack: TypeScript, HTML/CSS, React, Redux, Node.js, API design, Temporal Workflows, and SQL. We just rewrote our media engine in Rust.
• Crafting with AI: Building an agent or experimenting with media-generation models.
• Experimentation/Analytics Experience: We like people who know how to measure their success through experimentation and product analytics.
• Intricacies of Video: Shaders, graphics rendering, audio/visual effects, and media formats.

Base salary range: $220,000-$265,000, plus equity and benefits. Benefits include a generous healthcare package, 401k matching program, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time.

Descript is building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI. We are a team of 150 and have the backing of some of the world's greatest investors (OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital). Our headquarters are located in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA.

We're especially interested in working with engineers who use the product and are aligned with our mission. To that end, we promise to review any application that includes a share link to a Descript video. The video can be about anything. If you take the time to make something in Descript, we'll commit to having a human watch it and review your application.