Product Manager, Media Management

About the role

Descript's core innovation is editing video by editing the script. And every script edit — whether humans or AI — depends on accurate transcripts, precise alignment, and correct speaker detection. Underlord, our video editing agent, relies on precise visual understanding to make your video look better.

As the Product Manager for Media Management, you'll own the media processing pipelines that turn raw recordings into editable, searchable, AI-ready content from transcription to visual understanding. You'll also build the media library that makes Descript the home for everything that teams upload, record, and generate. In short, this role owns the capabilities that make Descript smart, and you'll be building infrastructure that every other team depends on.

What you’ll do

• Create search capabilities that unlocks content reuse across projects, enabling both humans and AI agents to quickly find and repurpose content
• Own the upload, transcription, and visual understanding pipelines, making strategic tradeoffs between accuracy, latency, and cost
• Work with AI research to make sure we have the best models in the world for our media understanding and processing pipelines
• Make it seamless for large teams to ingest and export high volumes of media from their systems.
• Balance competing priorities across customer segments, from small creators who need simple, reliable uploads to enterprises processing thousands of files

Who you are

• You've built enterprise products that people love. You have 5 or more years of product experience creating products for users with high volumes, complex needs, and zero tolerance for downtime, all without sacrificing the user experience that makes people want to use your product.
• You can steer technical teams. You can work effectively with research and engineering teams to push for better outcomes without being a researcher or engineer yourself. You're comfortable evaluating ML models, running experiments to measure quality improvements, and making tradeoffs between accuracy, performance, and cost.
• You start with the customer: Plenty of “AI products” start with the technology and they all suck. You care deeply about understanding customers, and have experience in doing customer discovery and defining features that solve real problems.
• You are a fog sculptor: There are aspects to our product and its design that do not have real competitors yet. The product intuition and design conventions have not been decided. We need product managers who are attracted to ambiguous problems, know how to ask smart questions, and translate ideas into action.
• You care about craft: Our product is not a hype machine that runs on empty promises and vaporware. We think our product will be successful because people love to use it. That means sweating the details. But without the sweat, because you aren’t stressed out.
• You are funny, creative, maybe kind of weird: Ok, this isn’t a hard requirement but Descript is kind of a quirky place and the people who love it tend to like that about working here. So, just want to drop a hint early on. Also, the sense of humor is important because even though we take our work seriously it’s still just, like, video creation and editing. We aren’t flying rockets into space so let’s all have a good time.

The base salary range for this role is $171,000 - $235,000/year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, and location, and may vary from the amount above. 

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