Software Engineer, Product

Descript•San Francisco, CA

3d•$220,000 - $265,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Product engineering at Descript involves owning outcomes from idea to launch and measurement, collaborating closely with product, design, and engineering teams. The company is organized into teams focusing on distinct product areas: Editor, Growth & Monetization, Media, and AI. Regardless of the team, engineers will design and build thoughtful, reliable full-stack systems that deliver value to users. Engineers will have the opportunity to own meaningful product surfaces end-to-end, shape the product beyond just implementation, build ambitious full-stack systems, improve team learning and shipping practices, and raise the team's technical ambition through mentorship and architectural direction.

Requirements

5+ years of experience building and shipping customer-facing products, including end-to-end features that measurably improved user or business outcomes.
Effectively leverage agents to multiply impact and think critically about how to better harness AI in your work.
Owned features/experiments end to end, from planning through launch, and leveraged analytics and metrics to evaluate impact.
Orient quickly in unfamiliar systems by exploring and asking thoughtful questions to both teammates and agents.
Care about how software feels and notice when the technically correct result is still wrong for the user.
Create clarity in ambiguous work and can navigate and simplify significant product and technical complexity.
Validate work rigorously through focused reproductions, logs, tests, and other evidence.

Nice To Haves

Experience working on an editor, media product, creative tool, or payment system (like Stripe).
Experience with Descript's stack: TypeScript, HTML/CSS, React, Redux, Node.js, API design, Temporal Workflows, and SQL.
Experience rewriting media engines in languages like Rust.
Experience building an agent or experimenting with media-generation models.
Experience with experimentation and product analytics to measure success.
Understanding of the intricacies of video, including shaders, graphics rendering, audio/visual effects, and media formats.

Responsibilities

Own meaningful product surfaces end to end, from definition through design, implementation, launch, measurement, and maintenance.
Shape the product by partnering 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, creating responsive, reliable experiences using technologies like TypeScript, React, NodeJS, and Temporal.
Improve team learning and shipping practices by forming hypotheses, instrumenting work, releasing incrementally, and reading results honestly.
Strengthen tooling, standards, tests, observability, and release practices to enable the team to move quickly without compromising quality.
Raise the team’s technical ambition by providing architectural direction, thoughtful reviews, mentoring, and clear human writing.