Descript
Software Engineer, Infrastructure
San Francisco, CA or Remote, US · Senior
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$1,187 more — $221,187 — moves this role to Level IV and 4 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $221,187 would place this position at wage Level IV. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
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About the role
- AI and agent tooling is the clearest example.
- Architecture decisions here last: this is a small team covering a large surface.
- You'll have real room to decide things, and you'll stay close to the systems you decide about.
Responsibilities
- Descript is building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio - an editing tool built for the age of AI.
- 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
- You've owned an architecture or migration, from planning through launch, whose consequences outlived the project, and you can say what you'd do differently.
- Experience that helps:
- If you haven't run a GPU fleet, experience with expensive capacity-constrained systems transfers well.
- Required:
- You have 8+ years building and operating production distributed systems, or equivalent server-side engineering with a heavy infrastructure focus.
- You effectively leverage agents to multiply your impact and think critically about how and when to harness AI in your work.
- You've run systems where failure was expensive, and your opinions about reliability and deployment come from consequences rather than reading.
- You've carried a pager, commanded an incident, and rolled back before you understood why.
- You use SLOs and error budgets as operating tools.
- You've used a major cloud provider and Kubernetes in production, with infrastructure-as-code as your default.
- You've found important unowned work, scoped it, earned buy-in, and delivered it without being handed a spec.
- You build a minimal repro, read the logs, and write targeted checks to prove a fix works instead of trusting output.
- GPU and ML infrastructure: capacity planning, training or inference pipelines, serving cost and latency. If you haven't run a GPU fleet, experience with expensive capacity-constrained systems transfers well.
Compensation
- $220,000 to $292,000, plus equity and benefits.
Benefits
- include a generous healthcare package, 401k matching program, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time.
- 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
- We're especially interested in working with engineers who use the product and are aligned with our mission.
- We are a team of 150 and the backing of some of the world's greatest investors ( OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital ).
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
This listing is sourced directly from Descript's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.