Staff Backend Engineer: Architect Systems, Scale & Impact

Scribd, Inc.; Portland (OR); Hybrid; USD 141,000 - 254,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Scribd Flex

Health, dental, vision coverage

Mental health support

Generous PTO

Parental leave

Equity

Job summary

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Everand Core team in Portland to own the backend platform powering discovery, personalization, and consumption journeys.

You will lead backend architecture, drive reliability, observability, and CI/CD, and collaborate with search, recommendations, design and ML teams to deliver scalable systems that guide product experiences across platforms. You’ll mentor engineers, socialize design docs, and push for debt-free, fast iteration while

Qualifications

• Significant backend engineering experience in distributed systems.
• Proficient in Ruby; knowledge of Scala, Go, or Python is a plus.
• Focus on reliability, observability, SLOs, metrics, and alerts.
• Experience leading teams through large migrations or modernization.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration with PM, design, ML partners.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the Everand backend: design documents, architecture reviews, and translate product intent into backend design.
• Own backend reliability and platform health, including staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, and observability.
• Mentor engineers, perform paired work, and raise the team’s design/testing/ops bar.
• Be the Everand backend voice in cross-team planning and execution.
• Foster technical excellence to deliver scalable, observable systems with velocity.
• Modernize legacy systems and reduce technical debt to improve velocity.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Analytics, Web/Mobile/ML to support experimentation and a single source of truth.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Ruby

Scala/Go/Python

Reliability/Observability

Mentoring/Leadership

Job description

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Everand Core team in Portland to own the backend platform powering discovery, personalization, and consumption journeys.

You will lead backend architecture, drive reliability, observability, and CI/CD, and collaborate with search, recommendations, design and ML teams to deliver scalable systems that guide product experiences across platforms. You’ll mentor engineers, socialize design docs, and push for debt-free, fast iteration while