Staff Backend Engineer, Global Payments & Billing

Scribd, Inc.; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a payments architect to lead the technical design and implementation of our global billing systems.

You will own the end‑to‑end lifecycle of subscription payments, work with providers like Stripe/Adyen/Braintree, and ensure security and PCI compliance across currencies and regions. You will drive agentic engineering using AI to improve speed and reliability, build shared AI capabilities for payments, and define guardrails for AI‑assisted changes in PCI scope, maintaining

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical architecture and implementation of Scribd's payments and billing systems, the backbone of our subscription business.
• Design, build, and operate backend services that power subscription payments at global scale.
• Own billing lifecycle, global payments, invoicing, reconciliation, and financial reliability, integrating with multiple providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree) and supporting international currencies and local methods.
• Ensure compliance and security of financial systems through PCI DSS, tokenization, encryption, and secure data handling.
• Lead agentic engineering on the team: use AI agents across design, implementation, testing, debugging, and operations, and help the team adopt workflows that make us measurably faster without lowering the bar on correctness or security.
• Build shared AI leverage for payments, such as agent skills for alert triage, incident investigation, and anomaly detection, and runbooks, documentation, and context that agents can use reliably. Contribute these to Scribd's shared skills marketplace rather than building one‑off tools.
• Define guardrails for AI‑assisted changes in PCI scope: human review of every change, keeping cardholder and sensitive data out of prompts, logs, and unapproved tools, and clear testing and verification standards for AI‑generated code that touches money movement.

Job description

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a payments architect to lead the technical design and implementation of our global billing systems.

You will own the end‑to‑end lifecycle of subscription payments, work with providers like Stripe/Adyen/Braintree, and ensure security and PCI compliance across currencies and regions. You will drive agentic engineering using AI to improve speed and reliability, build shared AI capabilities for payments, and define guardrails for AI‑assisted changes in PCI scope, maintaining