Staff Backend Engineer — Scalable Systems, Flexible Work

Scribd, Inc.; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 141,000 - 267,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Scribd Flex (flexible work model)

Health, dental, vision coverage

Mental health support and disability

Generous paid time off

Parental leave and family support

Retirement matching and equity

Learning and development programs

Wellness and home office stipends

Complimentary Scribd access

Enterprise access to AI tools

Job summary

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Everand Core team in Los Angeles to own the backend platform powering Everand's web and mobile experiences, enabling rapid experimentation, personalization, and engaging reading/listening journeys.

You will collaborate with cross-functional partners across search, recommendations, design, and product, mentor engineers, and drive reliability, observability, and modernization of legacy systems to deliver scalable backend solutions that

Qualifications

• Significant experience in backend engineering and building scalable distributed systems.
• Proficient in at least one modern backend language (Ruby preferred, or Scala/Go/Python).
• Strong focus on reliability, observability, SLOs, metrics, and alerts in distributed systems.
• Proven leadership: setting architecture, mentoring, and driving large migrations or modernization.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the Everand backend and socialize design decisions.
• Own backend reliability, staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, and observability.
• Mentor engineers through reviews, pairing, and high design/ops standards.
• Serve as backend voice in cross-team planning and align with product and ML partners.
• Build scalable, observable systems and reduce technical debt to velocity and scale.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Analytics, Web, Mobile, and ML teams to support experimentation and a single source of truth across platforms.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Code quality

Technical leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Mentoring

Users-first mindset

Job description

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Everand Core team in Los Angeles to own the backend platform powering Everand's web and mobile experiences, enabling rapid experimentation, personalization, and engaging reading/listening journeys.

You will collaborate with cross-functional partners across search, recommendations, design, and product, mentor engineers, and drive reliability, observability, and modernization of legacy systems to deliver scalable backend solutions that