Staff Backend Engineer — Scalable Platform, Equity

Scribd, Inc.; Austin (CO); On-site; USD 141,000 - 254,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Scribd Flex

Comprehensive health coverage

Parental leave

Retirement matching

Learning and development

Equipment stipend

Job summary

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on the Everand Core team to own the backend platform powering Everand's web and mobile experiences, driving experimentation, discoverability, and personalization.

You’ll collaborate across search, recommendations, web, mobile, and design to align technical decisions with user needs and platform capabilities. You will lead reliability, CI/CD, observability, and backend design, mentoring engineers and raising the team’s bar while shaping the

Qualifications

• Significant backend engineering experience with scalable distributed systems.
• Proficiency in at least one modern backend language (Ruby preferred, others listed).
• Strong focus on reliability, observability, metrics, alerts, and debugging distributed systems.
• Proven leadership: setting architecture direction, mentoring, and large-scale migrations.
• Ability to collaborate with PM, design, ML, and other partners across teams.
• Experience shaping engineering culture and driving cross-team initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the Everand backend; socialize design and drive architecture reviews.
• Own backend reliability and platform health including staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, and observability.
• Mentor engineers, perform code reviews, and raise the team's engineering bar.
• Act as the backend voice in cross-team planning and execution.
• Foster technical excellence while building scalable, observable systems that enable fast delivery.
• Modernize legacy systems and reduce technical debt to boost velocity.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Analytics, Web, Mobile, and ML teams to support experimentation and a single source of truth.
• Focus on user impact and translate empathy into robust backend design.

Skills

Ruby

Scala

Go

Python

Distributed systems

Backend architecture

Mentoring

Cross-functional collaboration

SLOs & observability

Job description

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on the Everand Core team to own the backend platform powering Everand's web and mobile experiences, driving experimentation, discoverability, and personalization.

You’ll collaborate across search, recommendations, web, mobile, and design to align technical decisions with user needs and platform capabilities. You will lead reliability, CI/CD, observability, and backend design, mentoring engineers and raising the team’s bar while shaping the