Base Salary
$220k - $292k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the platform infrastructure, including GCP, Kubernetes, Temporal, GPU capacity, deployment, rollback, and on-call systems.
- Build and operate infrastructure for model training, inference, and production model serving with attention to reliability, latency, and cost.
- Own metering, attribution, and cost trade-offs for infrastructure and inference usage.
- Manage identity and access, secrets management, least-privilege boundaries, and software supply-chain integrity.
- Create infrastructure-as-code, runbooks, observability, targeted checks, and in-repository technical context.
- Improve CI/CD, monorepo health, developer environments, testing, release practices, and team learning processes.
- Provide architectural direction, conduct thoughtful reviews, mentor engineers, and communicate clearly in writing.
Requirements
- 8+ years building and operating production distributed systems or equivalent server-side engineering with a heavy infrastructure focus.
- Production experience with a major cloud provider, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code.
- Experience operating systems where failures were costly, carrying a pager, commanding incidents, and performing rollbacks.
- Practical use of SLOs and error budgets as operating tools.
- Experience owning an architecture or migration from planning through launch and evaluating its long-term consequences.
- Ability to identify unowned work, scope it, gain buy-in, and deliver without a predefined specification.
- Ability to create minimal reproductions, analyze logs, and write targeted checks to validate fixes.
- Experience effectively using AI agents and critically evaluating when to apply them.
- Preferred experience with GPU and ML infrastructure, training or inference pipelines, model serving, production security engineering, IAM, secrets, software supply chain, least privilege, cloud cost modeling, commitment strategies, reservations, unit economics, CI/CD at monorepo scale, developer environments, and media, video, or GPU-backed workloads.
- Experience working on small teams with broad ownership, such as at a Series B–D company or an internal platform team.
Benefits
- Base salary of $220,000 to $292,000 plus equity and benefits.
- Generous healthcare package.
- 401(k) matching program.
- Catered lunches.
- Flexible vacation time.
- Remote and hybrid opportunities are available; remote employees have periodic in-person collaboration opportunities, and hybrid employees are not required to be in the office every day.
- Headquarters are in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Tech Stack
Categories
H1B sponsorship
Sponsorship for this role is unconfirmed.
Descript’s past filings provide context. They do not guarantee sponsorship for a current opening.
H1B petition approvals by fiscal year
- FY 20253
0 initial/new employment approvals · 2 changes of employer
- FY 20242
0 initial/new employment approvals · 1 changes of employer
Counts are petitions, including continuing employment and amendments, rather than unique hires. Source: USCIS
Job fields receiving H1B certifications
Partial fiscal year, through Q3
- Computer and Information Research Scientists1 · 33%
- Data Scientists1 · 33%
- Web and Digital Interface Designers1 · 33%
Job fields come from government occupation codes, rather than internal departments. Counts are certified Labor Condition Applications, not visa approvals or unique hires. Withdrawn and denied cases are excluded.
Source: US Department of LaborMatched government employer: DESCRIPT INC.
About Descript
In Descript you can make any video you want, any way you want. All you need is an idea; it helps if you know how to type. With the world’s first and only AI co-editor, Underlord, you can make a video just by describing your vision. It will create, edit, and design your video—all under your direction. It’s got the taste and judgment you want in a creative partner and the expertise you need from a video editor. And it’s tireless—so you can stay focused on getting the result you’re after while it does all the dirty work. And when you want to get dirty, you don’t need special knowledge or skills. If you can edit text, you can edit video with Descript. It’s loaded with automated design tools, plus the friendliest timeline editor you’ve ever seen, a built-in recorder, and hosted publishing that makes collaboration as easy as sending a link. With Descript’s powerful AI and intuitive tools, your creativity is unbounded—freed from the limitations of what you don’t know, and what AI can’t know. Create product demos, training videos, screen recordings, video messages, podcasts, or social clips. Join the 7 million+ creators and businesses using Descript, and create something impressive—something you can be proud of.