Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Fable Core
About the role
Fable Core is the backend, infrastructure, and platform team behind Fable – a social reading product now part of Scribd, Inc. Fable is a leading platform for everything related to books and reading: find your next book, join a book club, build a reading habit. We care deeply about building a great experience for our growing community of 1M+ monthly active users. The Fable app has often been featured in the App Store, both as App Of The Day and the Essential Book Apps list.
The Fable Core team is responsible for setting technical direction for the Fable backend, owning the reliability and health of the platform that powers the product, leading incident response end-to-end, and raising the ceiling for the team through design leadership and mentorship.
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for the Fable backend – write and socialize technical design documents, drive architecture reviews, and turn ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design.
- Own backend reliability and platform health, including staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, and observability.
- Lead incident response and drive durable postmortems – write the doc, run the meeting, and make sure action items actually ship.
- Raise the ceiling for the team through PR review, mentorship, pairing, and by setting a high bar on design, testing, and ops.
- Build and evolve the Fable backend platform so the team can ship faster and more safely.
- Bring agentic engineering practices into the team’s day-to-day work and help the team adopt them effectively.
Requirements
- 10+ years of backend experience, including meaningful time in Python/Django and at least one other stack (Go, Node, Java/Kotlin, or similar).
- Experience operating production systems on a major cloud – OLTP databases at scale, container orchestration, queueing, and CI/CD.
- A track record of owning incidents end-to-end, including the follow-through.
- The ability to write a TDD that a staff peer trusts and a product lead can understand, and to turn ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design.
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills – you hold your own with senior PM, design, and ML partners, and you care more about the system landing than about being right.
- A pragmatic default paired with a strong systems instinct – you look for root causes, not symptoms.
- Hands-on experience with agentic engineering tools and workflows in a real production setting.
Qualifications
- Nice to have experience with subscription and entitlements systems (Stripe, RevenueCat, App Store / Play billing).
- Nice to have experience leading a platform or infra function through a migration (on-prem→cloud, AWS↔GCP, monolith→services, or similar).
- Nice to have experience working alongside ML teams on recommendation or feed systems.
Skills
- Python/Django
- Postgres
- Kubernetes
- Datadog
- GCP / AWS
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. San Francisco is our highest geographic market in the United States. In the state of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $171,000 [minimum salary in our lowest geographic market within California] to $267,000 [maximum salary in our highest geographic market within California]. In the United States, outside of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $141,000 [minimum salary in our lowest US geographic market outside of California] to $254,000 [maximum salary in our highest US geographic market outside of California]. In Canada, the reasonably expected salary range is between $179,000 CAD[minimum salary in our lowest geographic market] to $228,500 CAD[maximum salary in our highest geographic market].
We carefully consider a wide range of factors when determining compensation, including but not limited to experience; job-related skill sets; relevant education or training; and other business and organizational needs. 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.
This position is also eligible for a competitive equity ownership, and a comprehensive and generous benefits package.