Senior Platform Engineer, AI Infra & Reliability

Remote; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 292,000; Full time

Job summary

Descript is seeking an experienced engineer to own and operate production distributed systems and AI-enabled infrastructure. You will drive platform decisions across GCP, Kubernetes, and GPU fleets, while balancing reliability, cost, and security. You will mentor others and shape the roadmap for a small, capable team.

You’ll work closely with other engineering teams, own architecture initiatives end-to-end, and help scale this large surface area with a pragmatic, hands-on approach.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating production distributed systems.
• Leverage AI-enabled tooling to amplify impact in production systems.
• Experience with reliability and deployment decisions based on consequences.
• Carrying a pager, handling incidents, and rolling back when needed.
• Using SLOs and error budgets to operate effectively.
• Experience with major cloud providers and Kubernetes in production.
• Ownership of architecture or migration from planning through launch.
• Ability to identify unowned work, scope it, and deliver without a fixed spec.
• Ability to build minimal repros, read logs, and write targeted checks to confirm fixes.

Responsibilities

• Own our platform: GCP, Kubernetes, Temporal, GPU-backed export, deploy and rollback machinery, and on-call readiness.
• Oversee the AI enablement substrate: GPU capacity, training/inference pipelines, and production serving costs.
• Treat cost as an engineering constraint and optimize infrastructure decisions accordingly.
• Ensure security boundaries: IAM, secrets, least privilege, and supply-chain integrity.
• Make what you build legible: infrastructure-as-code, runbooks, and in-repo context for new engineers.
• Improve how the team learns and ships: hypothesis-driven work, instrumentation, incremental releases, and strong tooling.
• Raise the team’s technical ambition through direction, reviews, mentoring, and clear documentation.

Skills

Distributed systems experience

AI in production

Reliability engineering

Incident management

Infrastructure as code

Kubernetes in production

Cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, etc.)

Monitoring & observability

Tools

Terraform

CI/CD

Monorepo tooling

Logging & tracing

Job description

Descript is seeking an experienced engineer to own and operate production distributed systems and AI-enabled infrastructure. You will drive platform decisions across GCP, Kubernetes, and GPU fleets, while balancing reliability, cost, and security. You will mentor others and shape the roadmap for a small, capable team.

You’ll work closely with other engineering teams, own architecture initiatives end-to-end, and help scale this large surface area with a pragmatic, hands-on approach.