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← Descript

Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Descript
Location
San Francisco, CA or Remote, US
Posted
16 days ago
Department
Engineering
Salary
$220,000 to $292,000
What they actually want (must-haves)
  • 8+ years building and operating production distributed systems or equivalent server-side engineering with a heavy infrastructure focus
  • Experience leveraging agents to multiply impact and critical thinking about AI usage
  • Experience running systems where failure was expensive, with a focus on reliability and deployment
  • Experience with on-call responsibilities and incident management
  • Use of SLOs and error budgets as operating tools
  • Experience with a major cloud provider and Kubernetes in production
Nice to have
  • Experience with GPU and ML infrastructure, including capacity planning and serving cost
  • Production security engineering experience, including IAM and secrets management
  • Experience with cloud cost modeling and CI/CD at monorepo scale
  • Familiarity with media, video, or GPU-backed workloads
  • Experience working in small teams owning a large surface
What the job really is

As a Software Engineer in Infrastructure at Descript, you will own and enhance the platform that supports model training and deployment, focusing on reliability, observability, and security. You will collaborate with other engineering teams to understand their needs, make architectural decisions, and improve the team's processes for shipping and learning. Your role involves managing cloud infrastructure, contributing to AI tooling, and ensuring that systems are both cost-effective and reliable.

Benefits
  • Base salary: $220,000 to $292,000, plus equity and benefits
  • Generous healthcare package
  • 401k matching program
  • Catered lunches
  • Flexible vacation time
Things to weigh
  • No specific mention of the tech stack beyond GCP and Kubernetes
  • The role involves being on-call, which may impact work-life balance
  • Expectations for high reliability and cost management may add pressure
Job score4.2/5
Benefits3/5
Freshness4/5
Career value4/5
Role clarity5/5
Pay transparency5/5

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