Product Manager, AI Models · Descript

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:49:21 GMT
Engineering

Descript · San Francisco, CA · $171,000-235,000/year · remote

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.

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.

As a Product Manager, you'll be responsible for making build vs. buy decisions, evaluating research investment, guiding research direction, owning the evals strategy, driving quality standards, building feedback loops, partnering with product teams, enabling fast iteration, managing dependencies, optimizing COGS, and scaling research infrastructure.

You'll have a strong track record of making sound build vs. buy decisions in the AI space, balancing research exploration with shipping product value, and translating technical capabilities into user-facing product features.

You'll also have experience shipping AI/ML products to production at scale, with a deep understanding of modern ML/AI systems and LLMs, evals frameworks, model training pipelines, and inference infrastructure.

As a leader, you'll be able to articulate a multi-year vision while executing on near-term priorities, understand when to make strategic long-term bets vs. tactical short-term wins, and evaluate competitive landscape and market trends to inform research direction.

You'll be comfortable operating in ambiguity and setting direction when the path isn't clear, with a strong ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

You'll create processes and frameworks to help teams move faster, establish clear DRIs, success metrics, and timelines, and balance speed with quality and manage risk appropriately.

You'll have strong opinions, loosely held, and be able to make confident recommendations based on available data, but be open to changing your mind when new information emerges.

You'll understand research team dynamics, know how to motivate researchers and give them space to explore while keeping them aligned to product goals, and be able to translate between 'research interesting' and 'product valuable'.

You'll be deeply curious about AI, stay up-to-date on the latest models, techniques, and research papers, and have a point of view on where AI is headed and what it means for creative tools.

You'll be comfortable with infrastructure work, understand that great AI products require great infrastructure, and see MLOps and tooling as strategic investments, not just 'plumbing'.

You'll balance user empathy with technical constraints, advocate for the user experience while understanding technical and cost limitations, and think about the entire user journey, not just individual features.

This role is exciting because of the impact you'll have on Descript's AI strategy and competitive positioning, the scope of the role, the team you'll work with, the timing, and the learning opportunities.