Software Engineer (Backend), Content Foundations

About the role

The Content Foundations team builds the systems that power how content is uploaded, processed, and delivered across Scribd products. 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

• Contribute to core content systems: Design and implement features within ingestion pipelines, metadata services, and content processing workflows, with guidance from senior engineers and the EM on scope and trade-offs.
• Build reliable, observable systems: Implement production-quality services that handle diverse file formats, malformed inputs, retries, asynchronous workflows, and edge cases.
• Collaborate across teams: Partner with ML 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 enable improvements in metadata extraction, classification, and enrichment that power personalization and search.
• Leverage AI-driven engineering practices: Use LLM-based systems and AI coding agents in your day-to-day work, and share your learnings with the team.
• Grow your craft: Learn the domain deeply, take on increasingly ambitious problems, and develop your craft intentionally.

Requirements

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including exposure to production-scale systems.
• Experience with backend services, data pipelines, or content-processing systems, depth in any one of these is enough.
• Comfortable working with messy data and building systems resilient to real-world inputs.
• Proficient in at least one of Ruby, Python, or Go, and willing to ramp up on the others (our stack includes all three).
• Working familiarity with AWS (e.g., Lambda, SQS/SNS, S3) or similar cloud resources.
• Comfortable working with relational databases (SQL).

Qualifications

• Clear written and verbal communicator, able to collaborate with teammates and partner teams.
• Collaborative and curious, eager to learn from peers and contribute back.

Skills

• Nice-to-have experience with document formats (PDF, ebooks, markdown) and internals (parsing, OCR, transformation).
• Familiarity with ML/AI systems (embeddings, chunking, retrieval pipelines).

Benefits

At Scribd, Inc., your base pay is one part of your total compensation package and is determined within a range. Our pay ranges are based on the local cost of labor benchmarks for each specific role, level, and geographic location. The salary range listed is for the level at which this job has been scoped. In the event that you are considered for a different level, a higher or lower pay range would apply.

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
Retirement 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

In the state of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $126,000 [minimum salary in our lowest geographic market within California] to $196,000 [maximum salary in our highest geographic market within California].
In the United States, outside of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $103,500 [minimum salary in our lowest US geographic market outside of California] to $186,500 [maximum salary in our highest US geographic market outside of California].
In Canada, the reasonably expected salary range is between $131,500 CAD[minimum salary in our lowest geographic market] to $174,500 CAD[maximum salary in our highest geographic market].

Schedule

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