Descript

Descript

Engineering Manager, Agent

San Francisco, CA or Remote, US

Sponsorship not specified$222k-$262kDetected 20 days ago
SparkLLMsA/B TestingProduct StrategyProject ManagementVideo ProductionResearchLeadershipCollaborationAdaptability

About the role

  • Descript's Agent launched in Open Beta in July 2025.
  • Since then, we've been working on improving the user experience for chat-based editing, adding more capabilities into our agent, and improving our agent infrastructure to continue to scale as models get better and better.
  • Your management peers and direct reports will be based in San Francisco, New York, and distributed across the US and Canada.

Responsibilities

  • Own execution: Manage team prioritizes, drive alignment across stakeholders, adapt plans to maximize outcomes, and hold a high bar for delivery through active planning, prioritization, and follow-through
  • Drive operational excellence: Ensure execution is predictable, reliable, and sustainable, implementing best practices in project management and engineering processes
  • Maintain the technical bar: Guide architectural decisions, ensure sound design tradeoffs, address tech debt that slows execution, and drive delivery of high-quality, reliable systems
  • Manage team prioritizes, drive alignment across stakeholders, adapt plans to maximize outcomes, and hold a high bar for delivery through active planning, prioritization, and follow-through
  • Create stretch opportunities for ICs, deliver clear and direct feedback, and manage underperformance early
  • Communicates clearly and effectively across technical and non-technical audiences, and thrives in collaborative environments working closely with Product, Design, and Research partners
  • You will manage a team of 5-6 software engineers, report to the Head of AI Engineering, and partner closely with others across engineering, product, design, and AI research teams.
  • We believe in actively building a team rich in diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to better allow our employees, products, and community to thrive.

Requirements

  • Engineering Leadership Experience: 5+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years of engineering management experience delivering complex, cross-functional product work with high velocity and quality
  • AI moves very quickly and keeping pace with the market means you are already behind.
  • If you can read this, start your cover letter with: "Fun fact about me: I love pineapple on pizza."

Compensation

  • Experience building agents, developing evals, or leading teams building LLM-powered products
  • Experience building creative tools in the past or you're a frequent user of creative media tools. If you join Descript, you'll end up making lots of videos!

Benefits

  • include a generous healthcare package, 401k matching program, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time.
  • Connect customer needs, product vision, and technical realities in close collaboration with Product, Design, and AI Research by setting clear priorities and making tradeoffs to deliver results
  • Develop your team: Recruit, mentor, and grow engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and high performance.
  • For our hybrid roles, we're flexible, and you're an adult-we don't expect or mandate that you're in the office every day.

Company info

  • The Agent product engineering team partners very closely with our AI Research team, in order to achieve our mission to make video editing accessible to anyone.
  • This is the role for you if you are excited about driving progress in the following areas:
  • Building a best-in-class product experience for agentic video editing interactions (eg. tuning prompt templates and other key user workflows, addressing user feedback, building key product capabilities like chat history, etc)
  • Driving rapid, data-driven experimentation to push the limits on quality for the video editing agent (eg. model/routing experimentation, pricing experimentation, core agent investments around harness and tool design and token optimizations, etc)
  • Deepening the Agent Quality flywheel to better prioritize our roadmap by leveraging user data and signals to strengthen Evals and product analysis methodologies
  • Partnering with AI Research on roadmap for exploratory Agent improvements (eg. novel context management strategies, RL/new model development, multimodel explorations, etc)
  • Your primary focus in 2026 will be driving quality to move from beta to GA and delivering material impact for the business.
  • In this role, you will:
  • Define team direction: Connect customer needs, product vision, and technical realities in close collaboration with Product, Design, and AI Research by setting clear priorities and making tradeoffs to deliver results
  • Develop your team: Recruit, mentor, and grow engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and high performance. Create stretch opportunities for ICs, deliver clear and direct feedback, and manage underperformance early

Visa & Work Authorization

  • employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status
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This listing is sourced directly from Descript's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.