Description
About the Role
Descript is revolutionizing how traditional editing methodologies and AI technologies come together in every part of the creation process (recording, transcribing, editing, and sharing) to make it faster and easier than ever to create high quality content.
We are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead our Narrative Editing team, focused on the product experiences that enable creators to tell their story through both live and generative AI content creation and Descript’s flagship script-based editing experience.
Your primary focus in 2026 will be driving quality, by both improving quality and reliability on existing product surfaces, and producing the next iterations of those product experiences.
In this role, you will:
- 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
- Define team direction: Connect customer needs, product vision, and technical realities in close collaboration with Product, Design, and AI engineering 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
- 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
What You Bring
Minimum Qualifications
- 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
- Team Builder: Excels at hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineering talent, and creating collaborative, empowering, and high-performing team environments
- Strong Product Sense: Ability to think deeply about our customers and bring strongly informed opinions that contribute to great product experiences
- Technical Judgment: Strong technical background with the ability to guide architectural decisions, evaluate tradeoffs, and maintain engineering excellence without being hands-on day-to-day
- Effective Communicator: Communicates clearly and effectively across technical and non-technical audiences, and thrives in collaborative environments working closely with Product, Design, and Research partners
- Data-driven Thinker: Able to convert business objectives into technical metrics that accurately reflect progress towards those objectives and help guide prioritization
- Adaptable and Resilient: Thrives in fast-paced, high-ownership environments. Seeks opportunities to have impact and values the growth that comes with every new challenge
- AI Adaptability: Actively adapts to the changing landscape of tools and how they can be integrated into the operations of teams to make them more effective. AI is also woven throughout the Descript product, and an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the tools and how to evaluate them is essential to driving the success of our product experiences
Extra Credit!
- 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!
- Experience defining strategic technical quality metrics and driving success to those metrics
The base salary range for this role is $222,431-$261,684/year.