Staff Infrastructure Engineer at Descript - $292K

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

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare package

401k matching

Catered lunches

Flexible vacation time

Job summary

Descript is hiring a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to own the foundation your team runs on—platform, AI training/inference pipelines, and security boundaries. You will work across GCP, Kubernetes, and GPU fleets, balancing cost with reliability while leading architectural decisions and mentoring other engineers.

Remote within the US with some in-person collaboration at times. The role emphasizes ownership, outcomes over specs, and a path toward senior leadership in platform/engineering at

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating production distributed systems with infrastructure focus.
• Experience with AI-enabled platforms and scalable deployments.
• Strong reliability, monitoring, and incident-management approach.

Responsibilities

• Own our platform: GCP, Kubernetes, Temporal, GPU fleet, and deployment tooling.
• Manage AI enablement substrate: training/inference pipelines and cost.
• Make cost a design constraint and enable scalable growth.
• Security responsibilities: IAM, secrets, least-privilege, and supply-chain integrity.
• Produce readable infrastructure: IaC, runbooks, and in-repo context.
• Improve team learning and shipping: hypotheses, instrumentation, incremental releases.
• Provide architectural direction, mentoring, and clear written guidance.

Skills

ML/AI infrastructure

Platform engineering

Security engineering

Tools

Kubernetes

GCP

CI/CD

Job description

Staff Infrastructure Engineer at Descript - $292K — Remote

Compensation vs. Market: At $220K–$292K base plus equity, this is at the top quartile for Staff/Senior Staff Infrastructure Engineers in the US market (Levels.fyi data suggests Staff SWE infra at SF startups typically ranges $200K–$270K base). The equity component at a Series B/C-stage company backed by OpenAI and a16z adds meaningful upside potential.

Skills That Will Pay Off Long-Term: This role sits at the intersection of three high-demand domains:

• ML/AI infrastructure (GPU fleet management, training pipelines, inference serving) — one of the hottest skill areas in 2024–2026.
• Platform engineering (Kubernetes, GCP, CI/CD at scale) — perennially in demand.
• Security engineering (IAM, supply chain, least privilege) — increasingly board-level priority.

Culture Signals: Descript (150-person team, Series B/C stage) is large enough to have established processes but small enough that individual engineers shape architecture. The emphasis on "consequences over reading" and owning outcomes without specs signals a high-autonomy, high-accountability culture — green flag for senior engineers who are self-directed, red flag for those who prefer structured environments.

Work-Life Balance Considerations: On-call rotation is required and explicitly mentioned. While flexible vacation is offered, incident response is a real commitment. The upside: the team actively aims to reduce on-call noise, so there's ownership over improving your own quality of life.

Career Trajectory: Staff-level ownership here — setting architectural direction, mentoring, and shaping AI infrastructure policy — maps well to a Principal Engineer or VP Engineering path at a growth-stage company.

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA or Remote, US

Platform owns the foundation the company runs on: compute and deployment, reliability and on-call, CI/CD and monorepo health, developer environments, the infrastructure that model training and inference run on, and the security boundaries around all of it.

AI and agent tooling is the clearest example. You will contribute to how models are trained and served here, as well as how agents work inside our codebase: the environments they run in, the verification that makes their output trustworthy, and the review paths that keep it all legible. There is no industry standard and you'll help form our opinions rather than inheriting one.

Our users are other engineers. Expect to spend time with all the other engineering teams, understanding their needs and building a roadmap. There is no industry standard and you'll help form our opinions rather than inheriting one.

Architecture decisions here last: this is a small team covering a large surface. You'll have real room to decide things, and you'll stay close to the systems you decide about.

What You’ll Own

• Own our platform: GCP, Kubernetes, Temporal, the GPU fleet behind cloud export, and the deploy and rollback machinery everything ships through. You'll be in the on-call rotation, and we'll expect you to make it quieter and more actionable.
• The AI enablement substrate: GPU capacity, training and inference pipelines, and the reliability and cost of the systems serving models in production.
• Cost is an engineering constraint: Infrastructure decisions have a number attached and you're expected to make smart trade-offs. As inference grows with usage, the metering and attribution behind those numbers sit with this team.
• Security comes with the systems you run: Identity and access, secrets management, least-privilege boundaries, and supply-chain integrity.
• Make what you build legible: Infrastructure-as-code that explains itself. Runbooks and in-repo context written for someone jumping in to help. Observability that tells you what failed and why.
• 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:

• 8+ years building and operating production distributed systems, or equivalent server-side engineering with a heavy infrastructure focus.
• You effectively leverage agents to multiply your impact and think critically about how and when to harness AI in your work.
• You've run systems where failure was expensive, and your opinions about reliability and deployment come from consequences rather than reading.
• You've carried a pager, commanded an incident, and rolled back before you understood why.
• You use SLOs and error budgets as operating tools.
• You've used a major cloud provider and Kubernetes in production, with infrastructure-as-code as your default.
• You've owned an architecture or migration, from planning through launch, whose consequences outlived the project, and you can say what you'd do differently.
• You've found important unowned work, scoped it, earned buy-in, and delivered it without being handed a spec.
• You build a minimal repro, read the logs, and write targeted checks to prove a fix works instead of trusting output.

Experience that helps:

• GPU and ML infrastructure: Capacity planning, training or inference pipelines, serving cost and latency. If you haven't run a GPU fleet, experience with expensive capacity-constrained systems transfers well.
• Production security engineering: IAM, secrets, supply chain, least privilege. You don't need to have held a security title, but you should have owned these boundaries for systems you ran.
• Cloud cost modeling: Commitment strategy, reservations, unit economics.
• CI/CD: At monorepo scale, and developer-environment work.
• Intricacies of Video: Media, video, or GPU-backed workloads.
• Small teams owning a large surface: Whether at a Series B to D company or on an internal platform team.

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: $220,000 to $292,000, 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.

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.

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.

Is this infrastructure role fully remote or does it require office attendance? The role is listed as remote within the US, with a handful of optional in-person collaboration opportunities throughout the year. Hybrid work at the San Francisco headquarters is also available for those who prefer it. What is the salary range for the Software Engineer, Infrastructure position at Descript? The base salary range is $220,000 to $292,000 per year, plus equity and benefits. Final offers vary based on experience, expertise, location, and level. Does this role require being on-call, and how demanding is it? Yes, on-call rotation is explicitly part of the role. However, the team is actively expected to improve on-call quality — making it quieter and more actionable — so there is direct ownership over reducing the burden over time. Do I need prior GPU or ML infrastructure experience to apply? GPU and ML infrastructure experience is listed as helpful but not strictly required. The posting notes that experience with other expensive, capacity-constrained systems transfers well. How can I improve my chances of getting my application reviewed at Descript? Descript commits to having a human review every application that includes a share link to a Descript-created video — the topic can be anything personal or professional.

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