Senior Engineering Manager, Backend (Content Foundations)

Scribd, Inc.; Vancouver; Hybrid; CAD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Scribd, Inc. is seeking an Engineering Manager for Content Foundations to lead the team responsible for how content enters Scribd.

This role sits at the intersection of large-scale data infrastructure and applied AI, owning the vision for real-time ingestion and platform reliability. You will hire, grow, and inspire a founding team of backend and AI data engineers, shaping culture, standards, and career growth from day one.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering.
• 3+ years leading backend, data-infrastructure, or platform engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the vision and strategy for how content enters Scribd and lead the evolution of the ingestion platform.
• Build AI into the heart of the platform with ML/AI teams so documents are understood, trusted, and enriched from arrival.
• Turn platform capability into product impact by delivering supply-side roadmaps and enabling discoverability and AI-grounded workflows.
• Lead, grow, and inspire a founding team of backend and AI data engineers, shaping culture and standards from day one.
• Run the team as a product with roadmap, priorities, and commitments across the content organization.
• Champion security as a core design principle, ensuring safe processing at massive scale.
• Influence across the organization by partnering with senior product and engineering leaders.

Skills

Software engineering

Backend leadership

Data infrastructure

Platform engineering

AI platforms

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