Backend Engineer Billing

Overview

About The Company At Scribd Inc. (pronounced “scribbed”), our mission is to spark human curiosity. Join our team as we create a world of stories and knowledge, democratize the exchange of ideas and information, and empower collective expertise through our four products:
Everand, Scribd, Slideshare, and Fable.

This posting reflects an approved, open position within the organization. We support a culture where our employees can be real and be bold; where we debate and commit as we embrace plot twists; and where every employee is empowered to take action as we prioritize the customer. Scribd Flex allows employees to choose the daily work-style that best suits their needs, with occasional in-person attendance required for all Scribd Inc.

employees, regardless of location.

What we are looking for in new team members is GRIT — the combination of passion and perseverance toward long-term goals. The acronym stands for Goals, Results, Innovation, and Team, guiding our standards for individual and collective performance.

The Payments & Billing team powers Scribd’s subscription revenue engine by delivering the systems that manage billing life cycles, global payment processing, and financial reliability across Scribd, Everand, Slideshare, and Fable. Our focus areas include payment processing at scale, invoicing, reconciliation, fraud prevention, compliance, and support for international currencies and payment methods. We partner closely with Product, Finance, Risk, and Platform Engineering to ensure millions of readers can access our services daily.

• Lead the technical architecture and implementation of Scribd’s payments and billing systems, the backbone of our subscription business.
• Design, build, and operate backend services that power subscription payments at global scale.
• Own billing lifecycle, global payments, invoicing, reconciliation, and financial reliability—integrating with multiple providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree) and supporting international currencies and local methods.
• Ensure compliance and security of financial systems through PCI DSS, tokenization, encryption, and secure data handling.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence while driving scalable, resilient, and observable financial systems that enable teams to move fast, simplify complexity, and deliver revenue with confidence.
• Modernize legacy systems and eliminate technical debt to improve velocity and scalability.
• Partner with Product, Finance, Risk, Platform, and Analytics to deliver secure, reliable financial flows, leveraging data, metrics, and telemetry to uncover trends, resolve anomalies, and guide the team with clarity and foresight.
• Mentor engineers, shape cross-team technical strategy, and tackle some of the hardest scaling and security challenges in the company.

• 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, with hands-on SQL (e.g., MySQL, Postgre
  
  SQL) and familiarity with No
  
  SQL and caching.
• Observability and reliability practices: defining SLOs, implementing metrics/alerts, debugging distributed systems, and leading incident response.
• Proficiency in at least one modern backend language such as Ruby (preferred), Java, Go, or Python, with a focus on clean, maintainable, and secure code.
• Proven track record of technical leadership: setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and driving large-scale migrations or modernization efforts.
• Strong communication and collaboration across product, finance, risk, and platform teams, influencing technical and business decisions.
• Contributions to cross-team initiatives (mentoring, architecture review groups, knowledge sharing) that shape Scribd’s engineering culture.

• Strong Ruby coding ability.
• Experience designing and operating payment or billing systems.
• Experience integrating with major payment providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, Pay Pal) and managing multi-currency or local payment methods.
• Knowledge of compliance and security standards…