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. As Descript continues to grow, with generative AI at the heart of our mission to empower our users, we are actively seeking a Senior AI Platform Engineer.
This pivotal role involves deploying and optimizing our cutting-edge AI models for audio and video content creation. The ideal candidate for this role has extensive experience building infrastructure to efficiently train and deploy state of the art models, improving performance of model training and inference, strong low-level understanding of GPU workloads, and thrives in a fast moving, high-ownership environment.
This role can be remote in the US or based in the SF Bay Area.
What You’ll Do
- Design, implement, and maintain our AI infrastructure supporting our machine learning life cycle, including data ingestion, training, evaluation, and deployment.
- Collaborate with Machine Learning Engineers and Data Scientists to understand their infrastructure needs and ensure our AI systems are robust, scalable, and efficient.
- Work on optimizing and scaling of our models and algorithms for efficient inference.
- Deploy, monitor, and manage AI models in production.
- Implement rigorous security protocols to protect sensitive data and prevent abuse.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive product requirements and improve our AI platform.
- Stay up-to-date with the latest industry trends and technologies, and be ready to present potential use cases to the team.
What You Bring
- Experience in deploying and managing AI models in production.
- Knowledge of Python, C/C++, CUDA, and experience profiling GPU performance and distributed training runs.
- Experience with machine learning frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow or similar.
- Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) and container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Strong problem-solving abilities and excellent communication skills.
Nice to Have:
- Experience with generative AI models.
- Familiarity with audio and video processing.
- Knowledge of DevOps best practices.
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 senior and above Software Engineers to join our team.
The base salary range for this role is $160,000- $215,000/year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, location, and may vary from the amount above.
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.
Top Skills
What We Do
Descript builds simple and powerful collaborative tools for new media creators. We strive to eliminate the tedious work that often stands between an idea and its expression, so that creators can focus on developing their craft instead of their usage of tools.
Descript is a next generation digital media platform that offers a new "engine" that lets you edit audio by editing text (instead of waveforms).
That means it does transcription (both automated and human-powered, whichever you prefer), but more interestingly, it lets you move the audio around by simply editing the transcript.
If you're new to editing audio, you'll find it far easier - it's basically like using a word processor. If you're experienced, Descript is faster than waveform editing - and more fun.
If you work with voice audio (as opposed to music), Descript is what the future looks like...join us and change the world.
