Software Engineer - Core

Our vision is to build the next generation platform to enable easy and fast creation of audio and video content powered by cutting-edge AI. Building a revolutionary way to record, transcribe, edit and mix spoken audio and video comes with a series of unique challenges and requires solving hard and complex problems.   The Core Team does a wide breadth of critical work to bring users to realize their ideas in the novel media editing platform that is Descript. We are a fun and creative group of engineers who find their way along less-traveled code paths, often crossing borders to do systems integrations. Paying attention to performance and security, we own full-stack feature development, iterate on high stakes ancillary systems (auth, payments...), and make foundational investments to improve the app.  

Who we are

We are building the next-generation AI-powered platform and web application for easy and fast creation of audio and video content. Growing this revolutionary product involves unique technical challenges and requires solving hard and complex problems.

The Core Team builds features to help our users find each other and use Descript to create and communicate their ideas with the world. We own critical systems ancillary to the business, such as access control, team management, project organization, usage tracking, payments, and more.

We are looking for a full-stack software Engineer to help us expand these foundational systems.

What you’ll do:

• Own building and shipping new features across all levels of the stack (frontend and backend)
• Collaborate with product and design teams on crafting great user experiences
• Write high-quality testable code that's functional, long term maintainable and performant
• Take point on critical surface areas and help scale them to the next level
• Integrate systems to power Descript in smart ways

What you bring:

• Full-stack product engineer
• Well versed in web development and associated devtools
• Technologies: Typescript, React, REST API development, relational dbs
• Comfortable walking off the beaten path, at the edge of systems
• Experience integrating 3rd party services
• Track record of working on complex surface areas
• Strong at testing and debugging
• Solid collaboration and communication
• Growth mindset
• Competent with thinking about security risks & mitigations

Nice to have:

• Experience building account management features such as
  • Invite flows, domain discovery, team management
  • Paywalls, checkout, subscriptions… working with Stripe
  • Auth enterprise features like SSO and SCIM
• Opinions/experience with auth at scale: roles, permissions, RBAC, FGA

The base salary range for this role is $130,000- $215,000/year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, location, 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 — with a proven CEO 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, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time. Our headquarters are located in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA. We're looking to hire people who are local and able to join us at the office when needed. We're flexible, and you're an adult—we don't expect or mandate that you're in the office every day. But 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.