Senior Software Engineer, Client Platform

Descript is on a mission to make audio and video content creation and editing fast, easy, and accessible to all. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer for their Builder Experience team to enhance frontend performance and design systems, while mentoring other engineers and improving overall developer experience.

Responsibilities:

• Own the use of React across the codebase
• Use your expert knowledge of React to fix individual problems, design and ship systemic solutions, educate others, and keep pace with the ecosystem
• Establish migration patterns, measure render performance gains, and guide teams through transitions
• Evolve and scale Descript's component library
• Build accessible, composable, well-documented components in close partnership with Design, define contribution standards, and drive consistent adoption across product surfaces
• Profile, diagnose, and fix client-side performance bottlenecks
• Establish performance budgets, instrument key metrics, and build dashboards that keep the team honest
• Design framework-level patterns and tools to make good performance easier to achieve
• Identify gaps in our testing strategy, identify improvements large and small, and work with the entire engineering org to make changes across the codebase
• Write playbooks & docs, deliver tech talks, pair with product engineers, and create local tooling to improve developer speed and quality

Requirements:

• 5+ years of professional frontend or full-stack engineering experience, with deep expertise in React and the modern React ecosystem (hooks, concurrent features, Suspense). The number of years is less important than your ability to get deep into the details of the framework and browser performance
• Demonstrated experience working on a platform, infrastructure, or developer experience team. You've built tools and frameworks that other engineers depend on
• Strong understanding of client-side performance: profiling tools (React DevTools, Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse), rendering optimization, bundle analysis, and runtime performance tuning
• Hands-on experience building or significantly contributing to a design system or component library at scale
• Expertise in TypeScript and modern frontend build tooling
• Familiarity with state management approaches in large React applications, and informed opinions about the tradeoffs
• A track record of mentoring, guiding, and influencing other engineers through documentation, pairing, code review, or internal tooling, not just shipping your own code
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to propose technical direction and build consensus across teams
• Experience working on tooling in a monorepo: testing strategies, build systems, knowledge of pitfalls and opportunities
• Background in accessibility (WCAG, ARIA patterns) and inclusive component design
• Familiarity with CI/CD optimization for frontend builds and test pipelines
• Experience with Electron or desktop web-hybrid applications
• Contributions to open-source design systems, React libraries, or developer tooling