Software Engineer, Infrastructure (AI)

Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote, US

Base salary: $220,000–$292,000 per year, plus equity and benefits.

Company

Descript is a startup building an AI-powered video and audio editing tool for a team of approximately 150 people.

What you will do

• Own the platform foundation across GCP, Kubernetes, Temporal, GPU infrastructure, deployment, rollback, and on-call operations.
• Build and operate the infrastructure supporting model training, inference pipelines, and production AI serving.
• Improve reliability using SLOs, error budgets, observability, runbooks, targeted checks, and actionable incident response.
• Make infrastructure and cloud-cost trade-offs, including metering, attribution, capacity planning, and serving cost optimization.
• Design security boundaries covering identity and access, secrets management, least privilege, and software supply-chain integrity.
• Provide architectural direction, mentoring, technical reviews, and improvements to CI/CD, developer tooling, testing, and release practices.

Requirements

• 8+ years building and operating production distributed systems or equivalent server-side engineering with a strong infrastructure focus.
• Production experience with a major cloud provider, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience operating high-consequence systems, carrying a pager, commanding incidents, and performing rollbacks.
• Experience using SLOs and error budgets as operational tools.
• Experience owning an architecture or migration from planning through launch and delivering important unowned work independently.
• Ability to use AI agents effectively while critically evaluating when and how to apply them.

Nice to have

• GPU and ML infrastructure experience, including capacity planning, training or inference pipelines, and model-serving cost and latency.
• Production security engineering involving IAM, secrets, supply-chain security, and least privilege.
• Cloud cost modeling, commitment strategies, reservations, or unit economics.
• CI/CD at monorepo scale, developer environments, or media, video, and GPU-backed workloads.
• Experience on small teams owning a broad technical surface.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible remote work with occasional in-person collaboration opportunities.
• Generous healthcare package and 401(k) matching program.
• Catered lunches and flexible vacation time.
• Opportunity to influence the direction of an early-stage company with product-market fit.