Senior Software Engineer

Summary

Join Descript, a company building an AI-powered platform for audio and video content creation, as a Software Engineer. You will build and optimize high-performance systems for petabyte-scale media data. Responsibilities include developing video editing and streaming capabilities, collaborating with AI teams, engaging with the open-source community, and mentoring team members. The ideal candidate possesses 5+ years of software development experience, strong CS fundamentals, and expertise in video technologies. Descript offers a competitive salary, generous healthcare, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time. The role is based in San Francisco, with flexibility in office attendance.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software development experience
• Strong CS fundamentals, backend infrastructure experience, and understanding of digital video technologies, including formats, codecs, and processing tools (e.g. MP4, HVEC, HLS, WebRTC, MPEG-DASH, ffmpeg)
• Self-aware of strengths and seeking to constantly learn and improve
• Strong written and verbal communication

Responsibilities

• Build and optimize high availability, high performance systems to handle petabyte-scale data ingest, processing, and serving
• Provide a useful media platform to AI research and engineering teams train and integrate AI features that work on media, including multimodal LLMs, video transformation models, and information
• Engage with the open-source media and video engineering community to improve key tools like ffmpeg
• Develop tools to develop, test, benchmark, and debug our video and audio processing systems
• Discover, evaluate, and adopt new technologies that can enhance our services and/or improve our efficiency
• Mentor members on the engineering team, especially when it comes to video and audio technologies

Benefits

• Generous healthcare package
• Catered lunches
• Flexible vacation time