Senior Software Engineer, Agent

About The Role

We are building the next-generation AI-powered platform and web application for easy and fast creation of audio and video content. Building a revolutionary way to record, transcribe, edit, and mix audio and video on the web comes with a series of unique technical challenges and requires solving hard and complex problems. We are hiring Software Engineers at the senior and staff levels to join a few open roles on our Agent team, focused on building the future of Agentic Video Editing!

About The Team

Descript's Agent launched in Open Beta in July 2025. Since then, we've been working on improving the user experience for chat-based editing, adding more capabilities into our agent, and improving our agent infrastructure to continue to scale as models get better and better. The Agent team is a mix of AI Researchers and Software Engineers committed to our mission to make video editing accessible to anyone. Your peers will be based in San Francisco, New York, and distributed across the US and Canada.

This is the role for you if any of the following areas sound exciting:

• Experimentation to push the limits on quality for our video editing agent (eg. harness and tool design, token/context optimizations, RL/new model development, multimodal, etc)
• Building a best-in-class product experience for agentic video editing interactions and improving user retention (eg. tuning prompt templates and other key user workflows, addressing user feedback, building key product capabilities like chat history, etc)
• Laying the foundations for a best-in-class developer experience for building agents (eg. logging, evals framework, online monitoring and feedback loops, etc)

What You Bring

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional product engineering or fullstack experience
• Worked with Typescript, React, and RESTful APIs (or similar)
• Solid CS fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, databases (Postgres, Redis)
• High ownership and growth mindset
• You thrive in collaborative environments and enjoy working with other functions (e.g. product, design, AI research)

Extra credit!

• Experience building creative tools in the past or you're a frequent user of creative media tools. If you join Descript, you'll end up making lots of videos!
• Experience building agents, working evals infrastructure, or designing product experiences powered by LLMs

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 anyways.

At our current size and stage, we embrace a flat organizational structure and value the expertise and contributions of every team member. As such, we have a unified job title for our engineering roles where everyone, including those with Staff-level scope, is considered a Software Engineer. While titles may not change, we are actively seeking Software Engineers with senior-or-higher-equivalent experience to join our team.

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

About Descript

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 the backing of some of the world's greatest investors (OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital).

Descript is the special company that's in possession of both product market fit and the raw materials (passionate user community, great product, large market) for growth, but is still early enough that each new employee has a measurable influence on the direction of the company.

Benefits include a generous healthcare package, 401k 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 roles and hybrid roles. For those who are remote, we have a handful of opportunities throughout the year for in person collaboration. For our hybrid roles, we're flexible, and you're an adult—we don't expect or mandate that you're in the office every day. We do believe there are valuable and serendipitous moments of discovery and 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.

Key skills/competency

• AI-powered Video Editing
• Product Engineering
• Fullstack Development
• TypeScript & React
• RESTful APIs
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Agentic Systems
• PostgreSQL & Redis
• Scalability & Infrastructure
• CS Fundamentals