Job description
As a Product Designer, you’ll help shape the future of our core experience and growing design culture. You’ll own the end-to-end design of new features and evolution of existing ones in our editor. You’ll collaborate closely with user research, product management, engineering, and other designers to make complex workflows feel simple to users.
Our product is an intricate web of interconnected features, which means design at Descript is mostly about systems design. Designers who do well here love complexity and have a knack for navigating it collaboratively. Join us to help build the future of creative tools.
Responsibilities
- Play a key role in a feature team, driving design decisions and collaborating with stakeholders and fellow designers to shape innovative video editing experiences
- Set a high bar for craft, eye for detail, and deep empathy for users
- Own the design process from concept to execution
- Bring clarity to problems that are broad and ambiguous in scope, integrating user, business, and technical constraints through structured thinking and effective communication
- Contribute to the definition and expansion of our design system
- Collaborate deeply with diverse stakeholders (product management, engineers, designers, executives)
- Advocate for what you think is right, know when to disagree and commit
- Excited by the opportunity to mentor more junior designers on the team
Requirements
- 6+ years as a designer, the majority of it spent in product
- You have a portfolio demonstrating strong systems design and conceptual thinking
- Commitment to your craft and an exceptional command of color, typography, space, motion, and usability
- Experience designing web, mobile or desktop applications with sophisticated user workflows and systems design challenges
- Experience on a fast-growing team and ability to work through ambiguity and create clarity
- Clear, direct communication
- Self-direction, you own your own work and deliver on your commitments
- Tactics for leading the design process cross-functionally
- Great feedback skills—know how to give feedback that elevates others’ work inside and outside design and how to get feedback that elevates your own
- At least 3 of the following stand-out skills
Stand-out skills
- Past work building and/or working on a creation tool (e.g., word processor, design tool, audio or video editing tool)
- Experience building or working on a mature design system
- Experience with enterprise products and collaborative features
- Expertise in accessibility
- Comfort with designer-led user research
- An interest in Vibe coding (or, hey, code coding) for prototyping
- UI animation skills
- Strong understanding of AI/ML, and point of view on how to integrate it into existing experiences
The base salary range for this role is $226,000- $256,000/ year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, location, and may vary from the amount above.
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 — with a proven CEO 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, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time. Our headquarters are located in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA. We’re looking to hire people who are local and able to join us at the office when needed. We’re flexible, and you’re an adult—we don’t expect or mandate that you’re in the office every day. But 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.
