product
Posted May 16, 2025Product Manager, AI Models
at Descript
San Francisco, United StatesOn-site
Responsibilities
- Building and maintaining standardized 3P model integrations (LLM providers, generative model APIs).
- Make build vs. buy decisions : Evaluate when to train our own models vs. integrate third-party solutions based on market gaps, competitive advantage, and ROI
- Guide research direction : Use product insight to inform what the team trains and develops; use research understanding to guide product direction Evals & Quality
- Own the evals strategy : Design evaluation frameworks that are productionized and tied to real user needs, not just academic metrics
- Drive quality standards : Establish quality bars for 1P and 3P models before they ship to users
- Build feedback loops : Instrument data pipelines to continuously learn from user behavior and improve model performance Cross-Functional Orchestration
- Enable fast iteration : Build infrastructure and processes that let product teams experiment with AI capabilities quickly
- Manage dependencies : Coordinate research timelines with product roadmaps and feature launches Cost & Infrastructure
- Optimize COGS : Make strategic decisions on model selection, caching strategies, and infrastructure to balance quality, latency, and cost
- Scale research infrastructure : Ensure the team has the DevEx, training infra, and tooling to move fast Required Experience Product Sense
- Track record of making sound build vs. buy decisions in the AI space •
- Track record of partnering with engineering teams on infrastructure and platform work
- Designs experiments and A/B tests to validate hypotheses
Requirements
- Back in the day you needed like six monitors and a bachelor’s degree to edit video.
- Descript lets you do it by editing docs & slides, and increasingly by just asking AI.
- We’re looking for a Product Manager to help build the future of video editing with AI.
- You’ll work alongside a small, flat, highly collaborative team of experienced PMs, AI researchers, engineers, designers, and marketers.
- experience with cutting-edge AI technology in a product users love and grow fast in your PM craft.
- We're looking for a Product Manager to lead the AI Research and Enablement roadmap at Descript.
- This role sits at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research, production ML infrastructure, and product strategy.
- You'll be responsible for ensuring our AI capabilities are best-in-class while enabling our product teams to ship AI-powered features that delight users.
- Teams You'll Partner with AI Research
- The AI Research team leverages, trains, and validates powerful models for our product use cases across two core areas:
- LLM Research : Evaluating and optimizing LLMs for Descript products, co-designing agent architecture, experimenting with token optimizations and fine-tuning. AI Enablement
- The AI Enablement team supports integrating 1P and 3P models into the Descript product:
- MLOps infrastructure (evals framework, inference infra, training infra, data pipelines).
- Understanding of modern ML/AI systems and LLMs (you don't need to write the code, but you need to understand the tradeoffs) •
- Experience shipping AI/ML products to production at scale •
- Experience with evals frameworks, model training pipelines, and inference infrastructure
- Understanding of ML cost structures (training compute, inference costs, token economics)
- Experience working with research teams and helping them focus on high-impact work
- Comfortable with SQL, experimentation platforms, and analytics tools
- You know how to motivate researchers and give them space to explore while keeping them aligned to product goals
- You're deeply curious about AI
- You have a point of view on where AI is headed and what it means for creative tools
- You're excited about the opportunity to build AI-native products, not just add AI features
- You understand that great AI products require great infrastructure
- Impact : Your decisions will directly shape Descript's AI strategy and competitive positioning
- Team : Work with world-class researchers and engineers pushing the boundaries of AI for creativity
- Timing : Join at an inflection point as we scale from early AI features to building the world's best agentic video editor
- Learning : Constant exposure to cutting-edge AI research and the challenge of productizing it
- Descript is building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI.
Experience
- 4+ years of product management experience, with at least 1-2 years working on AI/ML products
Benefits
- Descript’s vision is to put video in every communicator’s toolkit.
- Can articulate a multi-year vision while executing on near-term priorities
- The base salary range for this role is $171,000-235,000/year.
- 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.
Additional details
- In the future, maybe you won’t even need to ask! But building a new way to record or generate (or both!) videos that look & sound good comes with a series of unique design, technology, and business challenges.
- In other words, we need really good product managers.
- Audio/Video Research : Models for understanding, augmenting, and generating audio/video content (transcription, lipsync, video regenerate, TTS, avatars, etc.).
- Balance research investment : Allocate team resources between long-term research bets, feature work, and maintenance
- Partner with product teams : Advise on which models or architectures are best suited for specific features over time
- Experience balancing research exploration with shipping product value
- Ability to translate technical capabilities into user-facing product features
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity and setting direction when the path isn't clear Skills & Competencies Strategic Thinking
- Understands when to make strategic long-term bets vs. tactical short-term wins
- Evaluates competitive landscape and market trends to inform research direction