Senior Software Engineer, AI Platform and Enablement

About the Role

We’re building a next-generation AI-powered platform and web application for creating audio and video content quickly and easily. This involves developing a revolutionary way to record, transcribe, edit, and mix audio and video on the web using state-of-the-art AI models—a challenge that requires solving complex technical problems.

We’re hiring a senior engineer to join our AI Platform and Enablement team. The ideal candidate thrives in a fast-moving, high‑ownership environment and is comfortable navigating the ambiguity of bringing research work into an established product.

The team’s objective is to support integrating cutting‑edge first‑party models (developed by our in‑house AI Research team) and third‑party/open source AI models into the Descript product.

• Build, maintain, and standardize third‑party model integrations, including consulting with other engineering teams that need AI model integration
• Design, implement, and maintain our AI infrastructure supporting our machine‑learning life cycle—including data ingestion pipelines, training developer experience and infrastructure, evaluation frameworks, and deployments/GPU infrastructure
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Research Engineers, and AI Researchers to understand their infrastructure needs and ensure our AI systems are robust, scalable, and efficient
• Optimize and scale our models and algorithms for efficient inference
• Deploy, monitor, and manage AI models in production

• Minimum Qualifications
  • Experience in deploying and managing AI models in production
  • Experience with the tools of large volume data pipelines like Spark, Flume, Dask, etc.
  • Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) and container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Knowledge of Dev Ops and MLOps best practices
  • Strong problem‑solving abilities and excellent communication skills
• Extra credit!
  • Experience with generative AI models
  • Familiarity with audio and video processing
  • Knowledge of Python, C/C++, CUDA, and experience profiling GPU performance and distributed training runs
  • Experience with machine‑learning frameworks like PyTorch, Tensor Flow or similar

Studies show that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification above, please apply anyway.

The base salary range for these roles is $180,000 – $286,000 per year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, location, level, and may vary from the amount above.

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 backed by some of the world’s greatest investors (OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital). Descript is a special company that has both product‑market fit and the raw materials—passionate user community, great product, large market—for growth, yet is still early enough that each new employee can measurably influence the company’s direction.

Benefits include a generous healthcare package, 401(k) 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 and hybrid roles. For those who are remote, we have opportunities throughout the year for in‑person collaboration. For our hybrid roles, we’re flexible and expect you to be an adult—you’re not required to be in the office every day, but we value the valuable and serendipitous moments of 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.