Software Engineer, Product

Descript•San Francisco, CA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

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.

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 your 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 your 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 your work rigorously through focused reproductions, logs, tests, and other evidence rather than trusting that the output looks right.

Nice To Haves

Work on an editor, media product, creative tool, or payment system (like Stripe).
TypeScript, HTML/CSS, React, Redux, Node.js, API design, Temporal Workflows, and SQL.
Rewriting our media engine in Rust.
Building an agent or experimenting with media-generation models.
Experience with experimentation and product analytics.
Intricacies of Video: Shaders, graphics rendering, audio/visual effects, and media formats.
Use the product and are aligned with our mission.

Responsibilities

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.