Senior Quality Engineer

As a QA Champion on our team, you’ll dive into manual testing across areas like audio and video editing, recording, media production, and web publishing, expanding test coverage for a rapidly evolving product. You’ll actively shape our quality strategy, contribute to tools, processes, and documentation, and help drive continuous improvement. Working closely with Engineering, you’ll boost confidence and visibility in our release process; ensuring quality every step of the way. This role is a chance to make a big impact on a creative product and be part of an innovative, collaborative team dedicated to delivering exceptional user experiences.

What You'll Do

• Quality Champion & User Advocate: Be the go-to expert on quality for your areas. You're more than a tester; you're our users' advocate, ensuring each feature works seamlessly for everyone.
• Early Bird Planner: Get involved early with Product and Design. Provide feedback on requirements, consider risk areas, and craft a test strategy that aligns everyone on quality.
• Master Test Strategist: Work closely with stakeholders to set an agreed-upon quality bar. Identify potential pitfalls and map out mitigation plans.
• Quality Pilot: Develop test plans, conduct hands-on testing, and coordinate bug bashes like a pro. During release time, you're crucial in deciding whether a feature is ready for rollout.
• User Whisperer: Collaborate with Customer Support to capture user feedback and integrate it into our engineering process. You're the bridge between our users and the team creating the magic.
• Big-Picture Quality Enhancer: Go beyond testing to elevate the overall quality of your areas. Partner with engineering to set and track quality goals. "Good is the enemy of great" is your motto!

What You Bring

• 5+ years experience in manual testing of web and desktop applications, ideally consumer-facing.
• 2+ years experience as a test lead on a team, product area, or feature.
• Full understanding of the product development lifecycle and experience writing test plans and manually testing software.
• Experience testing on both Mac & Windows.
• Excellent communication skills (verbal and written).

Nice to Have

• Experience testing AI models, products, or services.
• Experience in video editing tools.
• Personal or professional experience working with creative tools, especially for audio and video production.

The base salary range for this role is $140,000-$181,000. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, and location, and they 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.