Applied Research Scientist, AI Research

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA or Remote, US Descript's Research team builds the models behind the product's most distinctive features: Video Regenerate and lipsync, video translation, zero-shot voice and roomtone cloning, and Studio Sound. We don't build general-purpose generative models. We pick specific problems in the editing workflow and build specialized models for them. This isn't research for its own sake. Everything we build is meant to ship, and most of it has, going from prototype to a production feature used by millions of creators within months. This role is focused on multimodal understanding: training models to perceive edited media the way a human video editor does. Underlord, our AI editing agent, reasons about a project largely through a textual representation of it. Giving it direct perception of the media it's working on is what will let it judge its own output and reason about the creative choices in an edit, not just the structure of a project. It's also an open