Staff Backend Engineer: Scalable, Personalization Systems

Scribd, Inc.; Salt Lake City (UT); Hybrid; USD 141,000 - 254,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Scribd Flex (flexible work model)

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Paid time off and sabbaticals

Equity and retirement matching

Learning and development programs

Job summary

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on the Everand Core team to own the backend platform powering Everand’s discovery, personalization, and consumption journeys. Work with search, recommendations, web, mobile, and ML teams to drive performance and reliability.

Shape technical direction and mentor the team in a fast, cross-functional environment. You’ll modernize legacy systems, champion user-centric backend decisions, and collaborate with design and product partners to deliver

Qualifications

• Significant experience in backend engineering for distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Ruby (preferred) or Scala/Go/Python.
• Strong focus on reliability, observability, SLOs, metrics, and alerts.
• Proven leadership: architectural direction, mentoring, large migrations or modernization.
• Collaborates with PMs, design, ML and cross-team partners; prioritizes system landing over correctness.
• Mentors others; participates in architecture reviews and design discussions.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the Everand backend; socialize designs and drive architecture reviews.
• Own backend reliability and platform health including CI/CD, databases, queues, and observability.
• Mentor engineers, perform code reviews, and raise the team's design bar.
• Represent the Everand backend in cross-team planning and execution.
• Deliver scalable, observable systems that enable fast iteration and reduce complexity.
• Modernize legacy systems to improve velocity and scalability.
• Partner with Product, Design, Analytics, Web, Mobile, and ML teams to enable experimentation.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Ruby

Observability & SLOs

Leadership & mentoring

Cross-functional collaboration

User-focused design

Job description

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on the Everand Core team to own the backend platform powering Everand’s discovery, personalization, and consumption journeys. Work with search, recommendations, web, mobile, and ML teams to drive performance and reliability.

Shape technical direction and mentor the team in a fast, cross-functional environment. You’ll modernize legacy systems, champion user-centric backend decisions, and collaborate with design and product partners to deliver