Product Software Engineer

• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Health: We’ve got you covered with medical, dental, and vision benefits for all employees and their dependents. These include HMO and PPO healthcare plans.
• Retirement: We offer a variety of retirement plans, including employer matching. Not exciting to talk about, but the match is competitive and the plans are good.
• Time off: Paid holidays are a given, but you can also expect flexible time off. Feel comfortable to take the time you need, when you need it.
• Parental leave: New parents receive paid parental leave to spend quality time with their expanding families.
• Home-office stipend: Get your work-from-home setup ready with our home-office stipend.
• Destination off-sites: No matter where you decide to work, you’ll get to know your team at our annual off-site gatherings.- You orient quickly in unfamiliar systems by exploring and asking thoughtful questions to both your teammates and agents
• 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 care about how software feels and notice when the technically correct result is still wrong for the user
• You’ve owned features/experiments end to end, from planning through launch, and leveraged analytics and metrics to evaluate impact
• 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
• You effectively leverage agents to multiply your impact and think critically about how to better harness AI in your work
• Descript is a startup. We’re especially interested in working with engineers who use the product and are aligned with our mission
• Experimentation/Analytics Experience: We like people who know how to measure their success through experimentation and product analytics
• 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
• Intricacies of Video: Shaders, graphics rendering, audio/visual effects, and media formats
• Crafting with AI: Building an agent or experimenting with media-generation models- 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. 🤝
• We get an extremely high volume of applications and it can be hard to standout with just a Resume. In lieu of a cover letter, please consider attaching a link to a short video or writing a short note here about what in particular interests you about Descript or this role. We know this can be a time commitment, so our promise to you is that if you record and edit a video we will watch it!