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Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to lead the technical architecture and implementation of the Payments & Billing systems that power subscription revenue across Scribd, Everand, Slideshare, and Fable. This is a high-impact role on an agentic engineering team that uses AI agents (Claude Code, shared agent skills, integrations with Datadog, Sentry, Stripe) as part of daily design, build, test, triage, and operations workflows—while maintaining rigorous human review and security standards for systems that move money and sit in PCI scope.
You will lead the technical direction and implementation of backend services powering subscription payments at global scale. Key responsibilities include designing and operating billing lifecycle, global payments, invoicing, reconciliation, and financial reliability systems; integrating with multiple payment providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree); supporting international currencies and local payment methods; and ensuring compliance and security through PCI DSS, tokenization, encryption, and secure data handling.
A major part of this role is leading agentic engineering adoption on the team: using AI agents across design, implementation, testing, debugging, and operations; helping the team adopt workflows that measurably increase velocity without lowering correctness or security bars; building shared AI leverage (agent skills for alert triage, incident investigation, anomaly detection) that other teams can adopt; and defining guardrails for AI-assisted changes in PCI scope, including human review of every change, keeping sensitive data out of prompts and logs, and establishing clear testing and verification standards for AI-generated code touching money movement.
You will also modernize legacy systems and eliminate technical debt to improve velocity and scalability, using AI agents to accelerate migrations, refactors, and test coverage where appropriate. You'll partner with Product, Finance, Risk, Platform, and Analytics teams to deliver secure, reliable financial flows, leveraging data and telemetry to uncover trends and guide the team. Finally, you'll mentor engineers, shape cross-team technical strategy, and tackle some of the company's hardest scaling and security challenges, raising the bar on how the team designs, reviews, and verifies AI-assisted work.
Scribd, Inc. operates under a Scribd Flex model with occasional in-person attendance required for all employees regardless of location. The company prioritizes a culture of GRIT (Goals, Results, Innovation, Team) and values real, bold employees who debate and commit while embracing change.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of backend engineering experience with deep expertise in building and scaling distributed systems for financial or mission-critical workloads
- Strong foundation in data modeling, transactional consistency, and high-throughput architectures
- Hands-on SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and familiarity with NoSQL and caching
- Skilled in observability and reliability practices: defining SLOs, implementing metrics/alerts, debugging distributed systems, leading incident response
- Strong coding ability in at least one modern backend language (Ruby preferred, or Java, Go, Python) with focus on clean, maintainable, secure code
- Hands-on experience with agentic engineering tools and workflows in real production settings; daily use of AI agents with ability to explain tool/approach choices and recognize limitations
- Judgment to rigorously validate AI-generated code, protect sensitive data, and recognize when changes need deeper investigation or shouldn't be delegated to agents
- Proven track record of technical leadership: setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, driving large-scale migrations or modernization efforts
- Demonstrated ability to multiply team effectiveness through patterns, tooling, or review practices adopted by others, including for AI-assisted development
- Clear communication and cross-functional collaboration with product, finance, risk, and platform teams
- Contribution to cross-team initiatives (mentoring, architecture reviews, knowledge sharing) that shape engineering culture
PLUS (not required):
- Strong coding ability in Ruby
- Deep experience designing and operating payment or billing systems
- Integration experience with major payment service providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, PayPal) and multi-currency or local payment methods
- Knowledge of compliance and security standards (PCI DSS, encryption, tokenization)
- Understanding of fraud prevention strategies (chargebacks, retries, card fingerprinting, abuse detection)
- Led large-scale migrations between payment providers or billing systems with minimal customer impact
- Built agent skills, MCP integrations, or AI-assisted on-call and incident workflows adopted by other engineers
- Designed human-in-the-loop or AI code-review and merge controls in regulated or PCI-scoped environments
- Understanding of AI-specific security risks (prompt injection, secrets/PII leaking through agent context or logs, over-permissioned agent credentials)
