Software Engineer, Infrastructure (AI)

Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote, US

Base salary: $220,000–$292,000 annually, 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 AI enablement infrastructure for GPU capacity, model training and inference pipelines, and reliable production serving.
• Make infrastructure and cloud-cost trade-offs, including metering and attribution for growing inference usage.
• Design and maintain identity, access, secrets management, least-privilege boundaries, and software supply-chain security.
• Improve infrastructure-as-code, runbooks, observability, testing, release practices, and developer tooling.
• Provide architectural direction, conduct thoughtful reviews, mentor engineers, and help shape the platform roadmap.

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 systems where failures were costly, including incident command, pager duty, rollback procedures, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Experience owning an architecture or migration from planning through launch and independently delivering unowned work.
• Ability to use AI agents effectively, investigate failures through logs and minimal reproductions, and create targeted checks to validate fixes.

Nice to have

• GPU and ML infrastructure experience, including capacity planning, training or inference pipelines, serving cost, and latency.
• Production security engineering experience with IAM, secrets, supply-chain security, and least privilege.
• Cloud cost modeling, commitment strategies, reservations, unit economics, CI/CD at monorepo scale, or developer-environment work.
• Media, video, or GPU-backed workload experience.
• Experience on small teams with broad platform ownership, including Series B–D companies or internal platform teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote and hybrid roles are available; remote employees may have opportunities for in-person collaboration during the year.
• Healthcare coverage, 401(k) matching, catered lunches, flexible vacation time, equity, and other benefits.
• Applications including a share link to a Descript video receive human review.
• The San Francisco headquarters is located in the Mission District.