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 role is between $120,000 to $217,000 in the United States, outside of California, and between $153,000 CAD to $202,000 CAD in Canada, depending on the specific geographic location.
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
Equal Opportunity Employer
Scribd, Inc. is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We encourage people of all backgrounds to apply.