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Salary: USD 141,000 - 255,000 / annual
Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Everand Core team. Everand is a digital reading and listening platform helping billions of people discover, organize, and enjoy books. In this role, you will own the backend platform powering Everand's web and mobile experiences, from rapid experimentation to services driving discoverability, personalization, and core consumption journeys.
You will set technical direction for the Everand backend by writing and socializing design documents, driving architecture reviews, and translating product intent into concrete backend design. Key responsibilities include owning backend reliability and platform health (staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, observability), raising the ceiling for the team through code review, mentorship, and pairing, and serving as the Everand backend voice in cross-team planning. You will foster a culture of technical excellence, modernize legacy systems to eliminate technical debt, and partner with Product, Design, Analytics, and Web/Mobile/ML Engineers to deliver scalable systems that support experimentation.
The role emphasizes user-first thinking, grounding technical decisions in how they enhance the reading and listening experience. You will work closely with cross-functional partners including senior PMs, designers, and ML engineers, and contribute to broader engineering culture through architecture reviews and design discussions.
Scribd, Inc. operates under a "Scribd Flex" model supporting flexible work arrangements balanced with intentional in-person collaboration. Occasional in-person attendance is required regardless of location.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Significant experience in backend engineering with a strong track record building and scaling distributed systems
- Clean, maintainable, and secure code in at least one modern backend language: Ruby (preferred), Scala, Go, or Python
- Keen eye for reliability and observability; experience defining SLOs, implementing metrics and alerts, and debugging distributed systems
- Proven track record of technical leadership: setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and driving large-scale migrations or modernization efforts
- Ability to thrive in cross-functional collaboration with senior PM, design, and ML partners
- Enjoyment of mentoring, knowledge-sharing, and contributing to cross-team initiatives
- Deep care for users and understanding of how Everand impacts their daily lives
PLUS (nice-to-have):
- Strong coding ability in Ruby
- Experience improving reliability, latency, or throughput in large-scale distributed systems
- Experience working alongside ML teams on recommendation or feed systems
- Familiarity with experimentation or feature-flagging platforms
