Senior Backend Engineer, Content Foundations

About the role

The Content Foundations team builds the systems that power how content enters, evolves, and is delivered across Scribd. This includes everything from ingestion, metadata extraction, early quality controls, and the core artifacts that power search, recommendations, AI/ML systems, and the reading and listening experience.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive technical initiatives: Lead the design, implementation, and scaling of core content systems, including ingestion pipelines, metadata services, and content processing workflows.
• Build scalable, reliable systems: Design robust solutions that handle diverse file formats and edge cases while maintaining high availability and strong data integrity.
• Collaborate across teams: Partner with Content Security, ML Data Engineering, Search & Discovery, the Content Library squad, and Product to build systems that balance performance, scalability, and user experience.
• Improve content quality and discoverability: Work with ML and Discovery teams to improve metadata extraction, classification, and enrichment that power personalization and search.
• Drive platform evolution: Identify architectural opportunities, propose new capabilities, and help evolve Scribd’s content platform to meet growing scale and complexity.
• Mentor and lead: Provide technical guidance across teams and help raise the bar on system design, data modeling, and production excellence.
• Champion AI-driven engineering: Help shape how we leverage AI and LLM-based systems within content processing, while maintaining a high bar for quality and reliability.
• In addition to building AI into our pipeline, you will help lead the team's adoption of AI coding agents and advanced developer tools to accelerate how we build and scale our systems.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including experience navigating the trade-offs of refactoring legacy systems while maintaining high availability.
• Experience building and scaling ingestion pipelines, ETL workflows, or document/content processing systems.
• Comfortable working with messy data and building systems resilient to real-world inputs.
• Proficient in Ruby, Python, or Go (our stack includes all three).
• Experience with AWS (Lambda, SQS/SNS, S3, Step Functions) and distributed workflows.
• Strong database design skills (SQL and/or NoSQL), with a focus on reliability and resilience.

Qualifications

• Able to communicate technical complexity to non-technical stakeholders and have a track record of building consensus across cross-functional engineering teams.
• Able to mentor others and work collaboratively across teams.

Skills

• Document formats (PDF, ebooks, markdown)
• Internals (OCR, parsing, transformation)
• ML/AI systems (embeddings, chunking, retrieval pipelines)
• Spam or content security systems

Benefits

• Scribd Flex (flexible work model)
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• Mental health support and disability coverage
• Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick time, holidays, winter break, volunteer time, and sabbaticals
• Paid parental leave and family support benefits
• Retailment matching and employee equity
• Learning and development programs and professional growth opportunities
• Wellness and home office stipends
• Complimentary access to the Scribd, Inc. suite of products
• Enterprise access to leading AI tools

Pay

The reasonably expected salary range for this position is between $120,000 [minimum salary in our lowest US geographic market outside of California] to $217,000 [maximum salary in our highest US geographic market outside of California].

Schedule

Occasional in-person attendance is required for all Scribd, Inc. employees, regardless of location.