Staff Rust Backend Engineer - Core Infra & Content Library

Scribd, Inc.; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 145,000 - 262,000; Full time

Job summary

Scribd, Inc. is hiring for a senior software engineer to own the Content Library and Core Infrastructure. You will design, implement, and operate Rust services at scale, while evolving the Python userland and mentoring engineers across the company.

Join a team of senior, staff, and principal engineers and drive cross-functional projects with ML, search, product, and data teams. This role emphasizes performance, cost-efficiency, and strong governance in a large-scale content platform.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend, distributed, or data-intensive systems.
• Production experience writing Rust and strong proficiency in Python.
• Deep understanding of storage: S3, Parquet/Arrow, PostgreSQL/MySQL.
• Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency services including metrics, tracing, alerting, and debugging.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: leading cross-team projects and mentoring engineers.
• Experience with AWS and infrastructure-as-code workflows (Terraform).
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the Content Library's core Rust services at scale.
• Own features end-to-end from design to production operations.
• Evolve the Python userland and support engineers across the company.
• Lead cross-functional projects with ML, search, product, and data teams.
• Drive performance and cost-efficiency across the stack (DataFusion, Parquet, S3, PostgreSQL).
• Strengthen governance: data lineage, access controls, deletion propagation.
• Mentor the team through design reviews and improved developer tooling.

Skills

Rust

Python

Distributed systems

AWS

PostgreSQL

Data governance

Design docs

Mentoring

DataFusion

Open source

Tools

Terraform

Apache Arrow

Parquet

DataFusion

Job description

Scribd, Inc. is hiring for a senior software engineer to own the Content Library and Core Infrastructure. You will design, implement, and operate Rust services at scale, while evolving the Python userland and mentoring engineers across the company.

Join a team of senior, staff, and principal engineers and drive cross-functional projects with ML, search, product, and data teams. This role emphasizes performance, cost-efficiency, and strong governance in a large-scale content platform.