Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Everand Core

About the role

Your main focus will be to set technical direction for the Everand backend: writing and socializing design documents, driving architecture reviews, and turning ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design.

Own backend reliability and platform health, including staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, and observability.

Raise the ceiling for the team through PR review, mentorship, pairing, and by setting a high bar on design, testing, and ops.

Foster a culture of technical excellence while driving scalable, resilient, and observable systems that let teams move fast, simplify complexity, and deliver with confidence.

Modernize legacy systems and eliminate technical debt to improve velocity and scalability.

Partner with Product, Design, Analytics, and Web, Mobile, and ML Engineers to deliver backend systems that support experimentation and a single source of truth across platforms, using data, metrics, and telemetry to uncover trends, resolve anomalies, and guide the team with clarity and foresight.

Champion a user-first mindset, grounding technical decisions in how they enhance the reading and listening experience.

Requirements

• Significant experience in backend engineering, with a strong track record building and scaling distributed systems.
• Write clean, maintainable, and secure code in at least one modern backend language such as Ruby (preferred), Scala, Go, or Python.
• Have a keen eye for reliability and observability, and care about defining Service Level Objectives (SLOs), implementing metrics and alerts, and debugging distributed systems.
• Have a proven track record of technical leadership: setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and driving large-scale migrations or modernization efforts.
• Thrive in cross-functional collaboration, holding your own with senior Product Managers, designers, and Machine Learning partners, and caring more about the system landing well than about being right.
• Enjoy mentoring, knowledge-sharing, and contributing to cross-team initiatives, including architecture review groups and design discussions that shape Scribd's engineering culture.
• Care deeply about the users; understanding what makes Everand impactful in their daily lives and translating that empathy into the systems you build.

Qualifications

• Strong coding ability in Ruby.
• Experience improving reliability, latency, or throughput in large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience working alongside Machine Learning teams on recommendation or feed systems.
• Familiarity with experimentation or feature-flagging platforms.

Skills

• Experience with Ruby, Scala, Go, or Python.
• Understanding of distributed systems and reliability.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, observability, and monitoring.
• Ability to lead and mentor a team.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience with backend systems design and implementation.
• Knowledge of machine learning and its integration with backend systems.

Benefits

• 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

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.

Schedule

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