<aside> 💭 You might be wondering… Descript’s product is really cool, but what the heck am I going to be working on?! Here, we’re peeling back the curtain to give you more insight into the different Engineering teams and what they work on. Keep in mind, some of this may change over time and not all teams are actively hiring, so your Recruiter or someone on the team can fill you in on the latest.

The general interview process for Software Engineers looks something like this: Recruiter Phone Screen > Technical Interview > Virtual Onsite > Team Matching

You’ll meet engineers on various teams throughout the process and have an opportunity to ask them questions, but the deeper team matching conversations will happen at the tail end of the process.

</aside>

🎨 Editor Framework

• Team Charter: The Editor Framework team focuses on the foundational building blocks of the Descript audio and video editing experience
• The stack: Full-stack; frontend leaning
• What the team is working on:
  • Iterating on our script-and-scene audio and video editing paradigm to keep users in flow state during the editing process
  • Extending animation features, allowing users to easily create good-looking animations without tweaking keyframes
  • Improving the app’s performance and reliability during editing to make Descript’s performance indistinguishable from native competitors
  • Designing and building new tools for video editing that give users the same kind of “magic” that they’ve become used to for audio editing in Descript
  • Designing APIs and documentation for the Descript document model to be a better steward for internal users, and eventually external users
• This team might be a good fit for you if…
  • You enjoy work that ranges from precision UI work, like implementing new interfaces for script-, timeline-, and canvas-based media editing, to the “backend of the frontend,” including the underlying systems that define and and manipulate Descript projects

🍎 Core

• Team Charter: The Core Team is there to provide robust foundations for critical systems such as auth and payments, and build features that help our users find each other and use Descript to create and communicate their ideas with the world.
• The stack: Full-stack product engineering & systems integration
• What the team is working on:
  • Expanding our identity model to multiple levels: organizations, drives, workspaces, folders
  • Creating compelling subscription plans and upgrade incentives
  • Making our checkout experience as convenient as possible
  • Building account management features for large teams
  • Refreshing our auth UX
• This team might be a good fit for you if…
  • You want to work with a group of people who do serious work, but don’t take themselves too seriously
  • You enjoy thinking about complex systems and how to make them scale to the next level
  • You are a complex system with a growth mindset open to learn and scale to the next level
  • You are not afraid to work on critical surface areas and are comfortable walking off the beaten path at the boundary between systems

🦾 AI Platform

• Team Charter: Productionizing AI models which involves optimizing latency, throughput, evaluating them on different GPU’s and deployment pipelines. The team also focuses on the developer experience for our AI Research team and works on improving tooling for AI focused codebases.
• The stack: Python, Temporal, Pytorch, Postgres, BigQuery, Grafana, Honeycomb
• What the team is working on:
  • Optimizing quality and performance of our transcription pipeline which runs on Whisper. This involves work on reducing hallucinations and improving alignments while minimizing compute costs.
  • Collaboration with the Media team to provide real time AI effects like Eye gaze correction, Studio Sound, Green Screen etc
  • Build a framework to make data access easier for AI research while also improving data security.
• This team might be a good fit for you if…
  • Knowledge of Python, C/C++, CUDA, and experience profiling GPU performance and distributed training runs.
  • Have experience with ML frameworks like Pytorch, JAX, Tensorflow etc.
  • Like keeping up with latest developments in AI/ML engineering and thinking of how to apply them to real life use cases.

🌐 Client Platform

• Team charter: The Client Platform team strives to improve performance, reliability, and UX of the client app through shared building blocks
• The stack: Full-stack
• What the team is working on:
  • Building the foundation of our web and desktop apps
  • Building design systems to support UX consistency across products
  • Taking shared ownership of the release and packaging process of the app and websites
  • Helping define and improve methods to test our product surfaces (including e2e playwright and performance testing)
  • Building and maintaining standards for data fetching and client side state