Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Descript Descript · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Remote · Engineering

This role is for a Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Descript, a company focused on AI-powered audio and video content creation. The engineer will own and improve core production infrastructure, focusing on reliability, performance, availability, and quality. Responsibilities include developing solutions to enhance feature reliability, improving core infrastructure (clusters, networking, databases, observability), championing best practices, owning incident management, and working with leadership on production reliability goals. The role requires 5+ years of SRE or server-side engineering experience, strong systems fundamentals, and experience mentoring engineers. Nice-to-haves include experience with TypeScript, Kubernetes, GCP, and Terraform. The company uses AI in its media editor but this role is focused on the underlying infrastructure.

What you'd actually do

  1. Develop technical and business solutions that enable engineers to improve the quality and reliability of product features and systems that they build.
  2. Drive improvements to the reliability of our core infrastructure, such as production clusters, networking, databases, and observability systems.
  3. Champion best practices during reviews of code, technical designs, and launch plans.
  4. Own our incident management and fire drill processes.
  5. Work with engineering leadership to set goals and prioritize production reliability.

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years experience in production/site-reliability engineering OR 5+ years of server-side software engineering with an interest in working on core infrastructure
  • A solid understanding of at least two of: public cloud infrastructure, Linux systems administration, and DevOps tooling.
  • Basic coding skills to work on automation and technical guardrails.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to collaborate with other functions
  • Experience mentoring engineers, including code reviews, architecture discussions, and leadership skills

Nice to have

  • TypeScript
  • Kubernetes
  • Google Cloud Platform
  • Terraform

What the JD emphasized

  • reliability
  • performance
  • quality
  • infrastructure