Applied Research Scientist, AI Research

Descript; United States; Hybrid; USD 197,000 - 263,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare package

401k matching

Catered lunches

Flexible vacation time

Job summary

Descript is hiring in San Francisco or remote US for an ML-focused role to advance multimodal editing tools. You will design vision–language models, build benchmarks, and ship capabilities with product teams.

A strong track record in publications or product features using deep learning is highly valued; senior roles may own direction and mentorship in a collaborative, hybrid environment.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to design and implement deep learning algorithms with publications, open-source work, or shipped models.
• Strong programming skills and fluency in PyTorch.
• Track record of generating and evaluating many ML ideas quickly.

Responsibilities

• Multimodal understanding: build vision–language systems for editing features.
• Evaluation: design benchmarks that measure editorial quality vs. cost.
• Data: create datasets, including synthetic data when needed.
• Training: train from scratch or fine-tune foundation models.
• Shipping: move models from prototype to production with teams.

Skills

Deep learning algorithms

Publications / open-source

PyTorch fluency

Experimentation & evaluation

Mentoring or technical leadership

Idea generation in ML

Education

PhD or Master's in deep learning or related field

Tools

Python

Job description

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA or Remote, US

About the company

the company 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 ).

the company 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.

Compensation and benefits

Base salary range: $197,000–$262,500, 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.

• a generous healthcare package
• 401k matching program
• catered lunches
• flexible vacation time

Our headquarters are located in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA. We're hiring for a mix of remote roles and hybrid roles. For those who are remote, we have a handful of opportunities throughout the year for in person collaboration. For our hybrid roles, we're flexible, and you're an adult—we don't expect or mandate that you're in the office every day. We do believe there are valuable and serendipitous moments of discovery and collaboration that come from working together in person.

What you'll do

• Multimodal understanding: build vision-language systems that let the company's agentic editing features reason over the visual and audio content of a project.
• Evaluation: design the benchmarks and evals that make editorial quality measurable, and that balance quality against cost and latency.
• Data: build the datasets your work depends on, including synthetic data generation where real examples don't exist at scale.
• Training: train specialized models from scratch or fine-tune existing foundation models, whichever gets the capability we need.
• Shipping: take models from prototype to production with the agent and engineering teams.
• Direction-setting: identify the next research direction that should become a the company feature, not just a paper. More senior candidates should expect to own this directly; more junior candidates will grow into it.
• Publishing: take your work to academic venues if you'd like. We support it, but it isn't a requirement of the role.

What you bring

• Proven ability to design and implement deep learning algorithms, demonstrated by publications, open-source work, or models you've shipped.
• Strong programming skills and deep fluency in PyTorch.
• A track record of generating new ideas in machine learning. You produce more ideas than you can implement, and once an experiment setup is established, you can run and evaluate many of them quickly rather than being bottlenecked on infrastructure.
• Strong experimental judgment. You test ideas fast, and you're honest with yourself and the team about which ones don't pan out.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including when a direction isn't working, so the team doesn't waste time following a lead that's already dead.
• A PhD or Master's in deep learning or a related field, or equivalent experience. We care about the track record more than the credential.
• At least one of the following must be true:
  • Lead or first author of an accepted publication in a top venue: CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or similar.
  • Played a key role in shipping a production feature with deep learning as a core component.
• More senior candidates (Senior and Staff) should also bring a track record of owning research direction rather than executing a plan handed to them, and experience mentoring or technically leading other researchers or engineers.

Where breadth helps

Direct experience in multimodal understanding is welcome but not required, and we don't require domain-specific expertise in computer vision or speech and audio. Our team spans both, and strong general deep learning ability transfers. We hire against the bar above, and then expect you to grow into the domain.

• Vision-language models and multimodal understanding.
• Generative modeling for video, audio, or images.
• Post-training, fine-tuning, and RL on large foundation models.
• Building evaluation systems for generative or agentic outputs where metrics resist clean definitions.
• Taking a research idea through to a shipped, production-facing feature.

Equal opportunity employment

the company is an equal opportunity workplace—we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We believe in actively building a team rich in diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to better allow our employees, products, and community to thrive.