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Salary: USD 187,500 - 281,500 / annual
Scribd is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the newly formed Content Foundations team, which owns the ingestion platform for one of the world's largest document corpora. This role sits at the intersection of large-scale data infrastructure and applied AI, with responsibility for the system through which hundreds of millions of documents and presentations are uploaded, understood, transformed, and served to millions of customers and AI agents.
The Content Foundations platform powers two critical functions: it enables the product roadmap (faster uploads, richer document experiences, corpus growth) and serves as a platform for downstream teams (trust & safety, content understanding, supply, AI platform) that depend on its interfaces. The role carries three equal responsibilities:
**Technical Leadership**: Set the vision for real-time, AI-native ingestion; make architectural decisions that evolve a live, high-scale system; maintain quality and reliability standards for a system the entire company depends on.
**People Leadership**: Hire, grow, and inspire a founding team of backend and AI data engineers; shape team culture, standards, and identity from day one.
**Cross-functional Partnership**: Run the team's roadmap as a product; make commitments other teams can build against; 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 by partnering with ML teams; turning platform capability into product impact; leading and growing the founding team; running the team as a product with clear roadmap and commitments; championing security as a first-class design principle; and influencing across the organization to sequence a shared content mission.
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. You'll bring these capabilities to one of the world's largest document platforms at scale that matters.
**Requirements:**
- 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years leading backend, data-infrastructure, or platform engineering teams
- Depth in high-throughput distributed systems and data pipelines: streaming and event-driven architectures, ingestion and transformation at scale, and judgment to evolve a live, high-volume system toward real time
- 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: design 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, or content-serving and streaming systems
- Familiarity with RAG and retrieval infrastructure: chunking strategies, embedding pipelines, vector search, or 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 a blank page
