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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.
You have 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.
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, USA
About the role Descript's script-based editing features are at the heart of why creators trust us for their highest-stakes content. Product launches. Client interviews. Marketing campaigns. Content that represents them t
San Francisco, USA
, USA
, CAN
San Francisco, USA
San Francisco, USA
, USA
San Francisco, USA
San Francisco, USA
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.
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. 🤝
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.
Private AI software company providing text-based audio and video editing tools for creators and teams.
Visit company websiteJobs and hiring trendsUSD 220000-292000 yearly / year
Full-time
Senior · 8+ years experience
Remote
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