Staff Backend Engineer: Lead Scalable, Reliable Systems

Scribd, Inc.; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 141,000 - 254,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Scribd Flex

Health coverage

Mental health

Paid time off

Parental leave

Retirement matching

Learning and development

Wellness stipend

Scribd access

AI tools access

Job summary

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Everand Core team to own the backend platform powering Scribd's web and mobile experiences, enabling fast experimentation, personalization, and discovery.

You will collaborate with search, recommendations, and ML engineers, design partners, and product teams to deliver scalable systems, improve reliability, and guide the technical direction.

Equity, benefits, and a flexible work model are part of the total compensation.

Qualifications

• Significant experience in backend engineering and scaling distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Ruby (preferred) or Scala/Go/Python.
• Focus on reliability: SLOs, metrics, alerts, and debugging distributed systems.
• Proven technical leadership: architecture direction, mentoring, large migrations.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration with PM, design, ML teams.
• Mentorship and knowledge sharing across teams.

Responsibilities

• Define backend architecture and socialize design documents.
• Own backend reliability, CI/CD, databases, queues, costs, observability.
• Mentor engineers, review PRs, pair programming, raise technical bar.
• Serve as backend voice in cross-team planning.
• Drive scalable, observable systems with fast delivery and reliability.
• Modernize legacy code and reduce technical debt.
• Partner with Product, Design, Analytics, Web/Mobile/ML teams to align with data-driven decisions.
• Champion a user-first mindset in backend decisions.

Skills

Backend engineering

Ruby

Scala

Go

Python

Observability & SLOs

Job description

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Everand Core team to own the backend platform powering Scribd's web and mobile experiences, enabling fast experimentation, personalization, and discovery.

You will collaborate with search, recommendations, and ML engineers, design partners, and product teams to deliver scalable systems, improve reliability, and guide the technical direction.

Equity, benefits, and a flexible work model are part of the total compensation.