Applied Research Scientist, AI Research

The posting, as Descript wrote it

Descript's Research team builds the models behind the product's most distinctive features: Video Regenerate and lipsync, video translation, zero-shot voice and roomtone cloning, and Studio Sound. We don't build general-purpose generative models. We pick specific problems in the editing workflow and build specialized models for them. This isn't research for its own sake. Everything we build is meant to ship, and most of it has, going from prototype to a production feature used by millions of creators within months.

This role is focused on multimodal understanding: training models to perceive edited media the way a human video editor does. Underlord, our AI editing agent, reasons about a project largely through a textual representation of it. Giving it direct perception of the media it's working on is what will let it judge its own output and reason about the creative choices in an edit, not just the structure of a project. It's also an open research problem, since there's no settled way to represent or evaluate editorial craft, whether a cut lands or whether the pacing works. We have a unique dataset to work with.

Some recent work from the team

• Audio editing by latent inpainting : regenerating a masked span of speech
• Video Regenerate : regenerating a speaker's lower face to match new or translated audio
• Jumpcut Smoothing : generating a bridge across a cut so the join plays like a continuous take
• Anchored Tree Sampling : tree-based imputation that bounds drift in long video generation
• PoDAR : disentangling power from semantics in audio latents to make them easier to model

More at descript.com/research .

What you'll do

• Multimodal understanding: build vision-language systems that let Descript's agentic editing features reason over the visual and audio content of a project.
• Evaluation: design the benchmarks and evals that make editorial quality measurable, and that balance quality against cost and latency.
• Data: build the datasets your work depends on, including synthetic data generation where real examples don't exist at scale.
• Training: train specialized models from scratch or fine-tune existing foundation models, whichever gets the capability we need.
• Shipping: take models from prototype to production with the agent and engineering teams.
• Direction-setting: identify the next research direction that should become a Descript feature, not just a paper. More senior candidates should expect to own this directly; more junior candidates will grow into it.
• Publishing: take your work to academic venues if you'd like. We support it, but it isn't a requirement of the role.

What you bring

Required

• Proven ability to design and implement deep learning algorithms, demonstrated by publications, open-source work, or models you've shipped.
• Strong programming skills and deep fluency in PyTorch.
• A track record of generating new ideas in machine learning. You produce more ideas than you can implement, and once an

[…]
agentic outputs where metrics resist clean definitions.

• Taking a research idea through to a shipped, production-facing feature.

Compensation and benefits

Base salary range: $197,000–$262,500, plus equity and benefits. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, location, and level, 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 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.