Skip to main content

Software Engineer, Product

Descript
Hybrid - San Francisco, CA or Remote, USUpdated 11d ago
Base salary
$200k–$275k
Published base salary range
Location
Hybrid - San Francisco, CA or Remote, US
Remote eligibility
Employment
Full-time
Mid-level
Role family
Engineering
AI / ML
Apply on boards.greenhouse.io
Job actionsApply now
Job actionsApply now

About the job

About the role

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.

What You’ll Do

  • Own meaningful product surfaces end to end. Take problems from definition through design, implementation, launch, measurement, and maintenance.
  • Shape the product, not just the implementation. Partner 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. Create responsive, reliable experiences. Stretch from TypeScript and React to NodeJS and Temporal to first and third party integrations to get the job done.
  • Improve how the team learns and ships. Form hypotheses, instrument your work, release incrementally, and read results honestly.
  • Raise the team’s technical ambition. Provide architectural direction, thoughtful reviews, mentoring, and clear human writing.

What You Bring

Required

  • 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 your 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 your 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 can navigate (and simplify!) significant product and technical complexity.
  • Validate your work rigorously through focused reproductions, logs, tests, and other evidence rather than trusting that the output looks right.

Experience that helps

  • 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.
  • 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.

Compensation and benefits

Base salary range: $200,000-$275,000, plus equity and benefits. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, location, and level, and may vary from the amount above.

Benefits include a generous healthcare package, 401k matching program, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time.

About Descript

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 the backing of some of the world's greatest investors (OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital). Descript is the special company that's in possession of both product market fit and the raw materials (passionate user community, great product, large market) for growth, but is still early enough that each new employee has a measurable influence on the direction of the company.

Application instructions

We promise to review any application that includes a share link to a Descript video. The video can be about anything - your career, a favorite game or movie, a discarded audition tape for Love Island. If you take the time to make something in Descript, we'll commit to having a human watch it and review your application.

Skills & tags

What you can verify before applying

Compare the essentials before you leave: pay, remote scope, employment type, source, and the employer apply destination.