Senior Engineering Manager, Backend (Content Foundations)

Scribd, Inc.; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 198,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Scribd Flex

Health, dental, vision coverage

Mental health support

Paid time off

Parental leave

Retirement matching

Learning & development

Wellness stipend

Scribd product access

Enterprise AI tools

Job summary

Scribd, Inc. is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead Content Foundations' backend and AI data engineering team. This role shapes real-time ingestion, AI-enabled processing, and scalable data infrastructure while owning the team roadmap and security standards.

You will hire, coach, and align a founding team, set technical norms, and partner with product and AI teams to deliver measurable impact across Scribd's document platform. A hybrid work model with in-person collaboration is expected.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering.
• 3+ years leading backend, data-infrastructure, or platform engineering teams.
• Experience with high-throughput distributed systems and data pipelines.
• Enthusiasm for applied AI in production systems (LLM-based processing).
• Platform‑product mindset: designed interfaces and SLAs.
• Security-minded design for safe handling of untrusted input.
• Operational excellence: reliability and observability.
• Clear, direct communication with product, engineering, and partners.

Responsibilities

• Own the vision and strategy for content ingestion and evolve a real-time AI-native system.
• Lead the integration of AI into the platform and enable trusted document processing from arrival.
• Turn platform capabilities into product impact by delivering roadmap commitments.
• Build and grow a founding team of backend and AI data engineers and establish their culture and standards.
• Run the team as a product with defined roadmap, priorities, and cross-team commitments.
• Champion security as a core design principle across the platform.
• Influence across the organization by collaborating with senior product and engineering leaders.

Skills

Backend leadership

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

AI integration

Platform mindset

Security-focused design

Reliability & observability

Cross-functional collaboration

People leadership

Job description

Scribd, Inc. is on a mission to advance human understanding. Our four products — 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.

So what are we looking for in new team members? At Scribd, Inc., 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.

This posting reflects an approved, open position within the organization.

About The Team

Content Foundations is a newly formed team at the center of Scribd, Inc.'s biggest strategic investment. Behind our UGC brands (Scribd and Slideshare) sits one of the largest corpora of human‑created knowledge anywhere: hundreds of millions of documents and presentations. Every piece of that knowledge passes through one system. It's uploaded, understood, transformed, and served to millions of customers, and agents that cite it, ground it, and learn from it.

Content Foundations owns that system, and its work lands in two places at once. It powers the product roadmap: faster uploads, richer document experiences, and the growth of the corpus. And it operates as a platform for the teams that build on it: trust & safety, content understanding, supply, and AI platform teams all consume its interfaces. What this team ships translates directly into product outcomes for users and velocity for every team downstream. Content sits at the very top of Scribd, Inc.'s strategy: it's the engine of our consumer brands and the foundation of our growth, and the ingestion platform is where all of it begins.

About The Role

We're hiring the engineering manager for Content Foundations to build and lead the team that owns how content enters Scribd. This is a leadership role at the intersection of large‑scale data infrastructure and applied AI, and it carries three responsibilities in equal measure.

You'll be the technical leader for the platform: setting the vision for real‑time, AI‑native ingestion, making the architectural calls that evolve a live, high‑scale system, and holding the quality and reliability bar for a system the whole company depends on.

You'll be the people leader for the team: hiring, growing, and inspiring a group of backend and AI data engineers, and shaping its culture, standards, and identity from its first days.

And you'll be the partner the content organization plans around: running the team's roadmap as a product, making commitments other teams can build against, and representing the platform in decisions with product and engineering leaders across the company.

The industry is redefining what document ingestion means. Documents can now be parsed, classified, safety‑checked, and enriched in real time at the moment of upload, before they ever reach a reader, with vision‑language models and intelligent chunking replacing what OCR and batch pipelines used to approximate. You'll bring those capabilities into one of the world's largest document platforms, with the corpus scale to make it matter.

What You'll Do

• Own the vision and strategy for how content enters Scribd, and lead the evolution of one of the world's largest document platforms into a real‑time, AI‑native ingestion system.
• Build state‑of‑the‑art AI into the heart of the platform, partnering with ML and AI teams so that every document is understood, trusted, and enriched by intelligent systems from the moment it arrives, and is ready for both human readers and AI agents.
• Turn platform capability into product impact, partnering with product to deliver the supply‑side roadmap, make our content discoverable by readers, groundable by AI assistants and create visible wins for the contributors who grow the corpus.
• Lead, grow, and inspire a founding team of backend and AI data engineers, shaping its culture, hiring, technical standards, and career growth from day one.
• Run the team as a product, defining the roadmap, priorities, and commitments that teams across the content organization plan against, and building the operational excellence of a system the whole company depends on.
• Champion security as first‑class design principles, building a platform that safely processes untrusted content at massive scale and safeguards the corpus.
• Influence across the organization, partnering with senior product and engineering leaders across trust & safety, content understanding, supply, and AI platform teams to sequence one shared content mission.

You Have

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years leading backend, data‑infrastructure, or platform engineering teams.
• Depth in high‑throughput distributed systems and data pipelines: streaming and event‑driven architectures, ingestion and transformation at scale, and the judgment to evolve a live, high‑volume system toward real time while it keeps running.
• Enthusiasm for applied AI in production systems, with experience (or strong intent) integrating ML models, LLM‑based document processing.
• A platform‑product mindset: you've built systems other teams and product surfaces depend on, and you know how to design interfaces, SLAs.
• A security‑minded approach to building systems: you design for safe handling of untrusted input, least‑privilege access, and data protection from the start.
• Operational excellence: reliability, observability, and on‑call health are first‑class engineering work for you.
• Clear, direct communication with product, engineering, and cross‑functional partners.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with document processing at scale: conversion pipelines, vision‑language parsing, PDF and rich‑document formats, media transcoding, or content‑serving and streaming systems.
• Familiarity with RAG and retrieval infrastructure, such as chunking strategies, embedding pipelines, vector search, or grounding systems for LLMs and agents.
• Experience on UGC or marketplace platforms where content quality, trust, and scale intersect.
• Founding‑manager experience: standing up a new team and its platform from a blank page.

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 $187,5000 [minimum salary in our lowest geographic market within California] to $281,500 [maximum salary in our highest geographic market within California].

In the United States, outside of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $154,500 [minimum salary in our lowest US geographic market outside of California] to $267,500 [maximum salary in our highest US geographic market outside of California].

In Canada, the reasonably expected salary range is between $198,000 CAD[minimum salary in our lowest geographic market] to $252,500 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.

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

Get to Know Scribd, Inc.

About Scribd, Inc.

Life at Scribd, Inc.

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 [e-mail] about the need for adjustments at any point in the interview process.

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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.