Senior Backend Engineer, Content Foundations

Scribd, Inc. is on a mission to advance human understanding. Our four products—including Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable—help billions of people across the globe move beyond access and into insight, application, and expertise.

Culture at Scribd, Inc.: We support a culture where our employees can be real and be bold; where we debate and commit as we embrace plot twists; and where every employee is empowered to take action as we prioritize the customer. We believe the best work happens when individual flexibility is balanced with meaningful community connection. Scribd Flex empowers employees to choose the workstyle and location that support their best performance, while committing to intentional in‑person moments that strengthen collaboration and culture. Occasional in‑person attendance is required for all Scribd, Inc. employees, regardless of location.

We hire for “GRIT.” Traditionally defined as the intersection of passion and perseverance toward long‑term goals, GRIT reflects the mindset we expect from every employee. For us, it also serves as a practical framework for how we work: setting and achieving Goals, delivering Results within your role, contributing Innovative ideas and solutions, and strengthening the broader Team through collaboration and attitude.

About The Team & Role

The Content Foundations team builds the systems that power how content enters, evolves, and is delivered across Scribd. 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.

Why this role is interesting

You’ll be joining a small and growing team working at the boundary between messy, real‑world content and highly structured systems, where file formats vary, metadata can be inconsistent, and scale amplifies every edge case. Scribd operates a hybrid catalog of premium publisher content and user‑generated uploads, spanning diverse formats, decade‑old systems, and modern services evolving alongside them. Decisions made at ingestion ripple across every downstream system.

Current Focus Areas Include

• Content quality and early‑stage validation
• Spam detection at upload time
• OCR and content extraction for ML/LLM use cases
• Evolving content formats to support downstream AI workflows
• Security hardening in partnership with Content and Infra‑Security
• Architectural improvements to how content and metadata flow across systems, including improving data observability for complex, asynchronous pipelines

What You’ll Do

• Own and drive technical initiatives: Lead the design, implementation, and scaling of core content systems, including ingestion pipelines, metadata services, and content processing workflows.
• Build scalable, reliable systems: Design robust solutions that handle diverse file formats and edge cases while maintaining high availability and strong data integrity.
• Collaborate across teams: Partner with Content Security, ML Data 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 improve metadata extraction, classification, and enrichment that power personalization and search.
• Drive platform evolution: Identify architectural opportunities, propose new capabilities, and help evolve Scribd’s content platform to meet growing scale and complexity.
• Mentor and lead: Provide technical guidance across teams and help raise the bar on system design, data modeling, and production excellence.
• Champion AI‑driven engineering: Help shape how we leverage AI and LLM‑based systems within content processing, while maintaining a high bar for quality and reliability. In addition to building AI into our pipeline, you will help lead the team's adoption of AI coding agents and advanced developer tools to accelerate how we build and scale our systems.

Who You Are

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including experience navigating the trade‑offs of refactoring legacy systems while maintaining high availability.
• Experience building and scaling ingestion pipelines, ETL workflows, or document/content processing systems.
• Comfortable working with messy data and building systems resilient to real‑world inputs.
• Proficient in Ruby, Python, or Go (our stack includes all three).
• Experience with AWS (Lambda, SQS/SNS, S3, Step Functions) and distributed workflows.
• Strong database design skills (SQL and/or NoSQL), with a focus on reliability and resilience.
• Able to communicate technical complexity to non‑technical stakeholders and have a track record of building consensus across cross‑functional engineering teams.
• Enjoy mentoring others and working collaboratively across teams.

Nice‑to‑Have

• Experience with document formats (PDF, ebooks, markdown) and internals (OCR, parsing, transformation).
• Familiarity with ML/AI systems (embeddings, chunking, retrieval pipelines).
• Background in spam or content security systems.

If you enjoy working on complex, high‑scale systems where solving foundational problems unlocks value across an entire ecosystem, we’d love to hear from you.

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 $146,500 (minimum salary in our lowest geographic market within California) to $228,000 (maximum salary in our highest geographic market within California).

In the United States, outside of California, the reasonably expected salary range 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).

In Canada, the reasonably expected salary range is between $153,000 CAD (minimum salary in our lowest geographic market) to $202,000 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.

Working at Scribd, Inc.

Are you currently based in a location where Scribd, Inc. can employ you?

Employees must have their primary residence in or near one of the following cities. This includes surrounding metro areas or locations within a typical commuting distance:

United States
Atlanta | Austin | Boston | Dallas | Denver | Chicago | Houston | Jacksonville | Los Angeles | Miami | New York City | Phoenix | Portland | Sacramento | Salt Lake City | San Diego | San Francisco | Seattle | Washington D.C.

Canada
Ottawa | Toronto | Vancouver

Mexico
Mexico City

Benefits At Scribd, Inc.

• 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

We want our interview process to be accessible to everyone. You can inform us of any reasonable adjustments we can make to better accommodate your needs by emailing accommodations@scribd.com about the need for adjustments at any point in the interview process.

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, and believe that a diversity of perspectives and experiences create a foundation for the best ideas. Come join us in building something meaningful.

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