Senior Software Engineer (Python + Distributed systems)

About the role

The ML Data Engineering team at Scribd, Inc. is responsible for extracting, enriching, and processing metadata from large-scale document and media datasets. This role involves designing and optimizing large-scale event-driven and distributed systems, working closely with cross-functional teams, and integrating ML or LLM-based models into production systems.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to engineers across the organization, driving secure coding best practices.
• Lead the design, implementation, and scaling of event-driven, distributed systems to extract, enrich, and process metadata from large-scale document and media datasets.
• Partner with Data Science, Infrastructure, ML Engineering, and Product teams to architect and deliver robust systems that balance scalability, high performance, and rapid iteration.
• Contribute to the team’s engineering strategy, identifying gaps, proposing new initiatives, and improving existing frameworks.
• Build and maintain scalable APIs and backend services for high-throughput content processing.
• Leverage AWS services (ECS, Lambda, SQS, ElastiCache, CloudWatch) to design and deploy resilient, high-performance systems.
• Optimize and refactor existing backend systems for scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Ensure system health and data integrity through monitoring, observability, and automated testing.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience with a focus on backend or distributed systems development.
• Strong proficiency in Python (5+ years).
• Expertise in designing and architecting large-scale event-driven and distributed systems.
• Strong cloud expertise with AWS services (ECS, Lambda, SQS, SNS, CloudWatch, etc.).
• Solid understanding of system performance, profiling, and optimization.
• Experience leading technical projects and mentoring engineers.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.
• Bonus: Familiarity with data processing frameworks (Spark, Databricks) and workflow orchestration tools.
• Bonus: Experience integrating ML or LLM-based models into production systems.

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].

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
• Retailer 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