Software Engineer, Product

Descript; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 265,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare package

401(k) matching

Catered lunches

Flexible vacation

Job summary

Descript is seeking a product engineer to own meaningful surfaces end to end, from idea to impact. You will partner with product and design to shape interactions, while building robust full-stack systems and instrumented releases.

You’ll mentor others and help raise the team's technical ambition, applying analytics and AI to improve outcomes. We value a fast, thoughtful approach to shipping, deep collaboration across teams, and a hands-on mindset.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping customer-facing products.
• Experience leveraging AI to multiply impact.
• End-to-end ownership of features from planning to launch.
• Ability to quickly orient in unfamiliar systems.
• Strong focus on how software feels for users.
• Ability to create clarity in ambiguous work and handle complex tech challenges.
• Rigorous validation through tests, logs, and analytics.

Responsibilities

• Own meaningful product surfaces end to end from definition through launch and maintenance.
• Partner with Product and Design to propose better interactions and measurable outcomes.
• Build ambitious full-stack systems from TypeScript/React to Node.js and third-party integrations.
• Instrument work, release incrementally, and read results honestly to improve velocity.
• Provide architectural direction, reviews, mentoring, and clear, human writing.

Skills

5+ years exp

AI experience

End-to-end ownership

Analytics & metrics

Unknown systems adaptation

User-centric design

Rigorous validation

Tools

TypeScript

HTML/CSS

React

Redux

Node.js

API design

Temporal Workflows

SQL

Rust

Job description

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: owns our video editor. Help make traditionally complex video-editing workflows simpler, craft cutting-edge AI into practical creative tools, and build on our vision of turning a text-editor for video into a tool that puts video in everyone's communication toolkit.
• Growth & Monetization: owns onboarding and activation, growth loops and in-product experiments, plans and pricing, checkout, billing, and AI credits. Help turn visitors into customers and customers into revenue.
• Media: owns project and media management (plus importing, managing, manipulating, compositing, transitions, shaders, visual and audio effects, rendering, exporting, and more!).
• AI: owns our agentic co-editor, Underlord, and the external API that allows it to scale. Help improve Underlord's harness to enhance its powers, polish its UX and editor integration, and add more capability to our API to unleash Underlord on the world.

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 Own

• Own meaningful product surfaces end to end. Take problems from definition through design, implementation, launch, measurement, and maintenance. Improve core Editor workflows, shape the self-serve journey from signup through renewal, or help make Underlord more sentient.
• 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. Strengthen the tooling, standards, tests, observability, and release practices that help the team move quickly without compromising quality.
• Raise the team’s technical ambition. Provide architectural direction, thoughtful reviews, mentoring, and clear human writing.

What You Bring

Required:

• You have 5+ years of experience building and shipping customer-facing products, including end-to-end features that measurably improved user or business outcomes.
• You effectively leverage agents to multiply your impact and think critically about how to better harness AI in your work.
• You’ve owned features/experiments end to end, from planning through launch, and leveraged analytics and metrics to evaluate impact.
• You orient quickly in unfamiliar systems by exploring and asking thoughtful questions to both your teammates and agents.
• You care about how software feels and notice when the technically correct result is still wrong for the user.
• You create clarity in ambiguous work and can navigate (and simplify!) significant product and technical complexity.
• You 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. But we obviously live in a post stack world. We just rewrote our media engine in Rust. None of us knows 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.

Descript is a startup. 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 - 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.

Compensation and benefits

Base salary range: $220,000-$265,000, 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.

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.

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.