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Salary: USD 171,000 - 255,000 / annual
Scribd is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Everand Core team and help shape the future of how people discover, organize, and enjoy books. Everand is a growing platform focused on making stories more accessible, personal, and engaging for readers.
In this role, you will own the backend platform powering Everand's web and mobile experiences, including services for discoverability, personalization, and core consumption journeys. You'll set technical direction for the Everand backend by writing and socializing design documents, driving architecture reviews, and translating product intent into concrete backend design. You'll also own backend reliability and platform health, including staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, and observability.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting technical direction and driving architecture decisions for the backend platform
- Owning backend reliability, platform health, and operational excellence
- Raising the ceiling for the team through PR review, mentorship, pairing, and setting high standards for design, testing, and operations
- Serving as the Everand backend voice in cross-team planning and as the glue in cross-functional execution
- Fostering a culture of technical excellence while building scalable, resilient, and observable systems
- Modernizing legacy systems and eliminating technical debt to improve velocity and scalability
- Partnering with Product, Design, Analytics, and Web/Mobile/ML Engineers to deliver backend systems supporting experimentation
- Championing a user-first mindset and grounding technical decisions in user experience
You'll work closely with engineers across search, recommendations, web, and mobile, as well as design and product partners. The team values quality over speed, thoughtful planning over short-term hacks, and continuous improvement over "just good enough."
Scribd operates under a Scribd Flex model, which balances individual flexibility with meaningful in-person collaboration. Occasional in-person attendance is required for all employees.
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 such as 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 including architecture review groups
- Deep care for users and understanding of how Everand impacts their daily lives
PLUS:
- 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
