Senior Software Engineer

Role overview

Join Descript as a Senior Software Engineer on the Builder Experience (BIX) team. You’ll build the foundations that power product engineering, including UI foundations, performance, state management patterns, and developer tooling.

Responsibilities

• Evolve and scale Descript’s component library, building accessible, composable, well-documented components.
• Profile, diagnose, and fix client-side performance bottlenecks by setting performance budgets and instrumenting key metrics.
• Act as a force multiplier through technical writing (manuals/docs), tech talks, and close collaboration/mentorship (pairing, code review).
• Contribute to core areas such as:
  • Design system and core UI frameworks
  • Client performance and runtime optimization
  • State management patterns
  • CI/CD and tooling to keep the codebase healthy
  • Libraries and infrastructure that improve engineering productivity

Requirements

• Deep expertise in React and the modern React ecosystem (hooks, concurrent features, Suspense).
• Strong TypeScript skills and modern frontend build/tooling experience.
• Experience building or significantly contributing to a design system / component library at scale.
• Demonstrated experience on a platform, infrastructure, or developer experience team.
• Clear written/verbal communication; able to propose technical direction and build consensus.
• 5+ years professional frontend or full-stack experience (depth matters more than exact years).
• Track record of mentoring and influencing via documentation, pairing, code reviews, or internal tooling.
• Familiarity with state management tradeoffs in large React apps.
• Strong client performance knowledge (profiling + optimization, bundle analysis, runtime tuning).
• Experience working in a monorepo (testing/build systems and related pitfalls).

Nice-to-haves

• Open-source contributions to design systems, React libraries, or developer tooling.
• Experience with Electron or desktop web-hybrid applications.
• Background in accessibility and inclusive component design (WCAG, ARIA patterns).
• Familiarity with CI/CD optimization for frontend builds and test pipelines.