Head of Data, Descript
$224-276k
Office located in Mission District, San Francisco
AI video & podcast editor
Job no longer available
AI video & podcast editor
101-200 employees
Job no longer available
$224-276k
Office located in Mission District, San Francisco
101-200 employees
Company mission
To make it easy for anyone o record, edit, and share any video.
Role
Who you are
- You have 10+ years of experience in data, including at least 5 years in leadership roles
- You excel at turning complex data into clear, actionable insights and can confidently advocate for strategic decisions
- You communicate effectively across executive, product, and go-to-market teams, ensuring alignment and impact
- You know when data should drive decisions and when qualitative factors or intuition should play a role
- You are passionate about nurturing a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing culture that values curiosity, excellence, and continuous learning
- You have a proven track record of building and scaling data teams in high-growth tech companies
- You have hands-on experience across the data stack, from infrastructure to insights, with deep expertise in modern data architectures, cloud-based warehouses, ETL pipelines, and big data ecosystems
What the job involves
- In this role, you will lead a transformative journey, overseeing the entire data stack—from infrastructure to insights—to build a lasting data-driven culture and accelerate AI-first product development.
- As part of our leadership team, you will shape how we use data to unlock value, deepen customer insights, and drive innovation—balancing empirical evidence with strategic intuition.
- Your impact will extend across the organization, from advancing AI-first products to driving measurable business results
- Design an integrated data ecosystem: Build and maintain a data architecture that seamlessly collects, stores, and transforms raw data into meaningful insights
- Shape company strategy with data: Use data to identify opportunities, guide strategic decisions, and support long-term growth
- Champion data-driven decision-making: Promote the use of data in business and product decisions while recognizing the role of creativity and intuition
- Lead and develop a high-performing data team: Recruit, mentor, and support data engineers, analysts, and scientists, fostering a culture of growth, innovation, and ownership
- Collaborate across teams: Work closely with product, finance, marketing, and sales to ensure data-driven insights inform key decisions and drive impact
- Shape technical strategy: Align data infrastructure, tools, and processes with business goals to ensure scalability and efficiency
- Advance AI and machine learning efforts: Partner with AI teams to improve data quality, manage large-scale training datasets, and refine performance monitoring systems
Our take
The rise of digital content has made video and audio creation more important than ever, but producing polished media can still be quite complex. Descript makes editing accessible to anyone, simplifying recording, editing, and publishing. And its platform empowers over 7M users to bring ideas to life without needing advanced technical skills.
Descript's standout feature is its AI co-editor, Underlord, which lets users create and edit videos just by describing what they want,. It can generate rough cuts, add visuals and B-roll, apply AI effects, and format content for social media. While many creators are still wary of AI in content creation, Descript has built its tools to augment human creativity, giving users control while handling the heavy lifting.
Serving millions of creators and businesses worldwide, Descript keeps innovating with AI features that learn from user input. By combining intuitive tools with responsible AI, the platform is helping content creators work faster and smarter, reshaping video and audio production while keeping the creative vision firmly in human hands.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
30% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Oct 2022
$50m
SERIES C
Jan 2021
$30m
SERIES B
Total funding: $100m
Company benefits
- Health: We’ve got you covered with medical, dental, and vision benefits for all employees and their dependents. These include HMO and PPO healthcare plans
- Time off: Paid holidays are a given, but you can also expect flexible time off. Feel comfortable to take the time you need, when you need it.
- Parental leave: New parents receive paid parental leave to spend quality time with their expanding families.
- Home-office stipend: Get your work-from-home setup ready with our home-office stipend.
- Retirement: We offer a variety of retirement plans, including employer matching.
- Free food & refreshments: Come say hey! Visit our office for free lunch, snacks, and drinks.
- Destination off-sites: No matter where you work, you’ll get to know your team. We host two annual gatherings: a company-wide off-site and a team-specific off-site.
Company HQ
Civic Center, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Laura Burkhauser
(CEO)Laura joined Descript in 2023 as a VP of Product and became CEO in 2025. Prior to this, she was a Director of Product Management at Twitter and Rent The Runway.
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