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Salary: USD 154,500 - 281,500 / annual
Scribd, Inc. is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager for Content Foundations, a newly formed team at the center of the company's strategic investment in content infrastructure. This role leads the engineering team responsible for how content enters Scribd's platform—the system that processes hundreds of millions of documents and presentations uploaded by users.
Content Foundations operates as both a product platform and a strategic engine. It powers the consumer product roadmap (faster uploads, richer document experiences, corpus growth) and serves as infrastructure for downstream teams (trust & safety, content understanding, supply, and AI platform). Every document passes through this system: it's uploaded, understood, transformed, and served to millions of customers and AI agents that cite, ground, and learn from it.
In this role, you'll carry three equal responsibilities:
**Technical Leadership**: Set the vision for real-time, AI-native document ingestion. Make architectural decisions that evolve a live, high-scale system. Hold the quality and reliability bar for a platform the entire company depends on. The industry is redefining document ingestion—documents can now be parsed, classified, safety-checked, and enriched in real time at upload using vision-language models and intelligent chunking, replacing traditional OCR and batch pipelines.
**People Leadership**: Build and lead a founding team of backend and AI data engineers. Hire, grow, and inspire team members. Shape culture, technical standards, and career development from day one.
**Cross-Functional Partnership**: Run the team's roadmap as a product. Define priorities and commitments that other teams plan against. Partner with product to deliver supply-side roadmap wins. Represent the platform in decisions with product and engineering leaders across the company.
Key responsibilities include: owning the vision and strategy for content ingestion; building state-of-the-art AI into the platform core; turning platform capability into product impact; leading and growing the founding team; running the team with operational excellence; championing security as a first-class design principle; and influencing across the organization to sequence a shared content mission.
**Requirements:**
- 8+ years in software engineering
- 3+ years leading backend, data-infrastructure, or platform engineering teams
- Depth in high-throughput distributed systems and data pipelines (streaming, event-driven architectures, ingestion and transformation at scale)
- Judgment to evolve a live, high-volume system toward real time while maintaining operations
- Enthusiasm for applied AI in production systems, with experience or strong intent integrating ML models and LLM-based document processing
- Platform-product mindset: experience building systems other teams and product surfaces depend on; knowledge of designing interfaces and SLAs
- Security-minded approach: designing for safe handling of untrusted input, least-privilege access, and data protection from the start
- Operational excellence: reliability, observability, and on-call health as first-class engineering work
- Clear, direct communication with product, engineering, and cross-functional partners
**Preferred Skills:**
- Experience with document processing at scale (conversion pipelines, vision-language parsing, PDF and rich-document formats, media transcoding, content-serving and streaming systems)
- Familiarity with RAG and retrieval infrastructure (chunking strategies, embedding pipelines, vector search, grounding systems for LLMs and agents)
- Experience on UGC or marketplace platforms where content quality, trust, and scale intersect
- Founding-manager experience standing up a new team and platform from scratch
