Senior Software Engineer, Client Platform
$195k - $250k USD
About the Role
Descript is on a mission to make audio and video content creation and editing fast, easy, and accessible to all. We are building a cutting-edge media editor incorporating real-time collaboration, ground-breaking UX, and cutting-edge AI. This is the future of media!
The Builder Experience (BIX) team is one of the critical platform teams at Descript. The group is responsible for the foundations that every product engineer builds on top of. We own the design system, core UI frameworks, client performance, state management patterns, continuous integration, and the libraries and tooling that keep our codebase healthy and our engineers productive. If it touches the client shell, rendering pipeline, cross-cutting frontend infrastructure, or GitHub Actions, it's in our orbit.
We're looking for a engineer who is deeply fluent in modern React, passionate about frontend platform work, and energized by making an entire engineering organization faster and more effective. You'll combine hands-on systems work—performance tuning, dependency management, design-system evolution—with a strong coaching and enablement mindset, helping product teams adopt improvements and level up their craft.
What You'll Do
- React: Own the use of React across the codebase. Use your expert knowledge of React to fix individual problems, design and ship systemic solutions, educate others, and keep pace with the ecosystem. Establish migration patterns, measure render performance gains, and guide teams through transitions.
- Design System: Evolve and scale Descript's component library. Build accessible, composable, well-documented components in close partnership with Design, define contribution standards, and drive consistent adoption across product surfaces.
- App Performance: Profile, diagnose, and fix client-side performance bottlenecks. Establish performance budgets, instrument key metrics, and build dashboards that keep the team honest. Design framework-level patterns and tools to make good performance easier to achieve.
- Testing & Quality: Builder Experience owns frontend testing. Identify gaps in our testing strategy, identify improvements large and small, and work with the entire engineering org to make changes across the codebase.
- Enablement & Guidance: Act as a force multiplier. Write playbooks & docs, deliver tech talks, pair with product engineers, and create local tooling to improve developer speed and quality.
What You Bring
- 5+ years of professional frontend or full-stack engineering experience, with deep expertise in React and the modern React ecosystem (hooks, concurrent features, Suspense). The number of years is less important than your ability to get deep into the details of the framework and browser performance.
- Demonstrated experience working on a platform, infrastructure, or developer experience team. You've built tools and frameworks that other engineers depend on.
- Strong understanding of client-side performance: profiling tools (React DevTools, Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse), rendering optimization, bundle analysis, and runtime performance tuning.
- Hands-on experience building or significantly contributing to a design system or component library at scale.
- Expertise in TypeScript and modern frontend build tooling
- Familiarity with state management approaches in large React applications, and informed opinions about the tradeoffs.
- A track record of mentoring, guiding, and influencing other engixneers through documentation, pairing, code review, or internal tooling, not just shipping your own code.
- Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to propose technical direction and build consensus across teams.
Nice to Have
- Experience working on tooling in a monorepo: testing strategies, build systems, knowledge of pitfalls and opportunities.
- Background in accessibility (WCAG, ARIA patterns) and inclusive component design.
- Familiarity with CI/CD optimization for frontend builds and test pipelines.
- Experience with Electron or desktop web-hybrid applications.
- Contributions to open-source design systems, React libraries, or developer tooling.
At our current size and stage, we embrace a flat organizational structure and value the expertise and contributions of every team member. As such, we have a unified job title for our engineering roles where everyone, including those with Staff-level scope, is considered a Software Engineer. While titles may not change, we are actively seeking Software Engineers with senior-or-higher-equivalent experience to join our team.
The base salary range for this role is $195,000–$250,000/year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, location, level, and may vary from the amount above.
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About Descript
Descript is building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI. We are a team of 150 and the backing of some of the world's greatest investors (OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital).
Descript is the special company that's in possession of both product market fit and the raw materials (passionate user community, great product, large market) for growth, but is still early enough that each new employee has a measurable influence on the direction of the company.
Benefits include a generous healthcare package, 401k matching program, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time. Our headquarters are located in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA. We're hiring for a mix of remote roles and hybrid roles. For those who are remote, we have a handful of opportunities throughout the year for in person collaboration. 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. We do believe there are valuable and serendipitous moments of discovery and collaboration that come from working together in person.
Descript is an equal opportunity workplace—we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We believe in actively building a team rich in diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to better allow our employees, products, and community to thrive.