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Scribd is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to lead the technical architecture and implementation of its payments and billing systems, which power the subscription revenue engine across Scribd, Everand, Slideshare, and Fable. This is a high-impact role on a team that manages billing lifecycles, global payment processing, financial reliability, invoicing, reconciliation, fraud prevention, and compliance across millions of users worldwide.
You will design, build, and operate backend services that handle subscription payments at global scale, integrating with multiple payment providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree) and supporting international currencies and local payment methods. You'll own the security and compliance of financial systems through PCI DSS standards, tokenization, encryption, and secure data handling practices.
A key differentiator of this role is leadership in agentic engineering. You'll use AI agents (Claude Code, shared agent skills, integrations with Datadog, Sentry, Stripe) across design, implementation, testing, debugging, and operations. You'll help the team adopt AI-assisted workflows that measurably accelerate delivery without compromising correctness or security. You'll build shared AI leverage for payments—such as agent skills for alert triage, incident investigation, and anomaly detection—and contribute these to Scribd's shared skills marketplace. You'll also define guardrails for AI-assisted changes in PCI scope, ensuring human review of every change, keeping sensitive data out of prompts and logs, and establishing clear testing and verification standards for AI-generated code that touches money movement.
You'll modernize legacy systems and eliminate technical debt to improve velocity and scalability, mentor engineers, shape cross-team technical strategy, and partner with Product, Finance, Risk, Platform, and Analytics teams to deliver secure, reliable financial flows. You'll tackle some of the hardest scaling and security challenges in the company and raise the bar on how the team designs, reviews, and verifies AI-assisted work.
Scribd operates a hybrid model (Scribd Flex) with occasional in-person attendance required. Employees must be based in or near one of Scribd's approved locations, including San Francisco, or other major US metros (Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Houston, LA, Miami, NYC, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego, Seattle, DC), plus Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, or Mexico City.
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 expertise (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 production; daily use of AI agents with clear judgment about tool selection and limitations
- Proven ability 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 Ruby coding ability
- Deep experience designing and operating payment or billing systems
- Integration experience with major payment providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, PayPal) and multi-currency/local payment methods
- Knowledge of PCI DSS, encryption, tokenization, and compliance standards
- Fraud prevention expertise (chargebacks, retries, card fingerprinting, abuse detection)
- Large-scale payment provider or billing system migrations with minimal customer impact
- Built agent skills, MCP integrations, or AI-assisted on-call/incident workflows adopted by others
- Designed human-in-the-loop or AI code-review and merge controls in regulated/PCI-scoped environments
- Understanding of AI-specific security risks (prompt injection, secrets/PII leakage, over-permissioned agent credentials)
