Engineering Manager (Agent)

Descript; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 222,431 - 261,684; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous healthcare package

401k matching program

Catered lunches

Flexible vacation time

Job summary

A innovative software company in San Francisco is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a dynamic Agent team specializing in creating cutting-edge Agentic Video Editing solutions. This role involves managing engineers, driving project outcomes, and ensuring quality through effective technical decision-making. Ideal candidates will have extensive engineering leadership experience and a strong ability to foster team development in a fast-paced environment. Competitive pay and flexible working arrangements are offered.

Qualifications

• Must possess strong engineering leadership experience.
• Excels in developing and retaining engineering talent.
• Strong decision-making and technical judgment skills are required.

Responsibilities

• Own team execution and manage priorities.
• Define direction connecting products and customer needs.
• Drive operational excellence and maintain quality standards.
• Build a best-in-class video editing product experience.

Skills

Engineering Leadership Experience

Team Builder

Technical Judgment

Effective Communicator

Strategic Thinker

Adaptable and Resilient

Education

5+ years in software engineering, 2+ years in management

Job description

Descript is revolutionizing how traditional editing methodologies and AI technologies come together in every part of the creation process (recording, transcribing, editing, and sharing) to make it faster and easier than ever to create high quality content.

We are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead our Agent team, focused on building the world’s best Agentic Video Editor, Underlord. This is a rapidly changing landscape, and there are many unique technical challenges that come with building high quality, cost-effective Agents for handling the multimodal nature of video. You will manage a team of 5-6 software engineers, report to the Head of AI Engineering, and partner closely with others across engineering, product, design, and AI research teams.

Agent‑driven editing is a major company focus and this role requires strong product thinking and strategic partnership skills as the team continues to develop novel, high‑quality experiences around Agentic Video Editing.

About the team

Descript’s Agent launched in Open Beta in July 2025. Since then, we’ve been working on improving the user experience for chat‑based editing, adding more capabilities into our agent, and improving our agent infrastructure to continue to scale as models get better and better. The Agent product engineering team partners very closely with our AI Research team, in order to achieve our mission to make video editing accessible to anyone. Your management peers and direct reports will be based in San Francisco, New York, and distributed across the US and Canada.

What you’ll do

• Own execution: manage team prioritization, drive alignment across stakeholders, adapt plans to maximize outcomes, and hold a high bar for delivery through active planning, prioritization, and follow‑through.
• Define team direction: connect customer needs, product vision, and technical realities in close collaboration with Product, Design, and AI Research by setting clear priorities and making trade‑offs to deliver results.
• Develop your team: recruit, mentor, and grow engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and high performance. Create stretch opportunities for ICs, deliver clear and direct feedback, and manage underperformance early.
• Drive operational excellence: ensure execution is predictable, reliable, and sustainable, implementing best practices in project management and engineering processes.
• Maintain the technical bar: guide architectural decisions, ensure sound design trade‑offs, address tech debt that slows execution, and drive delivery of high‑quality, reliable systems.
• Build a best‑in‑class product experience for agentic video editing interactions (e.g., tuning prompt templates, addressing user feedback, building key product capabilities like chat history). Build
• Drive rapid, data‑driven experimentation to push the limits on quality for the video editing agent (e.g., model/routing experimentation, pricing experimentation, core agent investments around harness and tool design and token optimizations).
• Deepen the Agent Quality flywheel to better prioritize our roadmap by leveraging user data and signals to strengthen e‑valuations and product analysis methodologies.
• Partner with AI Research on roadmap for exploratory Agent improvements (e.g., novel context management strategies, RL/new model development, multimodel explorations).

What You Bring

• Minimum Qualifications
  • Engineering Leadership Experience: 5+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years of engineering management experience delivering complex, cross‑functional product work with high velocity and quality.
  • Team Builder: Excels at hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineering talent, and creating collaborative, empowering, and high‑performing team environments.
  • Technical Judgment: Strong technical background with the ability to guide architectural decisions, evaluate trade‑offs, and maintain engineering excellence without being hands‑on day‑to‑day.
  • Effective Communicator: Communicates clearly and effectively across technical and non‑technical audiences, and thrives in collaborative environments working closely with Product, Design, and Research partners.
  • Strategic Thinker: Plans ahead on a 12+ month horizon, but prioritizes and re‑prioritizes aggressively as new information emerges. Makes and communicates calculated bets.
  • Adaptable and Resilient: Thrives in fast‑paced, rapidly changing environments, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and drive results. AI moves very quickly and keeping pace with the market means you are already behind. High ownership and a bias toward action is a must.
• Experience building agents, developing evaluations, or leading teams building LLM‑powered products.
• Experience building creative tools in the past or you’re a frequent user of creative media tools. If you join Descript, you’ll end up making lots of videos!

Works: The base salary range for this role is $222,431–$261,684/year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, location, level, and may vary from the amount above.

Benefits

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

Descript 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.