Senior Software Engineer, Web API Platform

Overview  Senior Software Engineer, Web API Platform role at  Scribd, Inc. .
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. When it comes to workplace structure, we believe in balancing individual flexibility and community connections. It’s through our flexible work benefit, Scribd Flex, that employees – in partnership with their manager – can choose the daily work-style that best suits their individual needs.

A key tenet of Scribd Flex is our prioritization of intentional in-person moments to build collaboration, culture, and connection. For this reason, occasional in-person attendance is required for all Scribd Inc. employees, regardless of their location.
What we are looking for in new team members: the GRIT standard. GRIT stands for Goals, Results, Innovation, and Team — the core expectations for performance and collaboration.
About The Team
The Web Platform team is part of our Developer Platform organization and supports our broader Web Modernization efforts across the company. Our mission is to help product teams move faster by providing a scalable, well-designed API foundation that supports modern web architectures. We work to reduce coupling, improve developer experience, and establish durable integration patterns between frontend experiences and backend systems.

The platform we build will shape how teams develop, ship, and evolve our web products over time.
About

The Role
We are hiring a  Senior Software Engineer, Web API Platform  to help establish a company-wide API platform that accelerates web modernization  this role, you will design, build, and own new product-facing web APIs that span our full web product surface across Scribd and Everand. These APIs will serve as the primary interface between modern web applications and existing backend systems, enabling teams to evolve toward more scalable, maintainable frontend architectures with confidence.

Today, our web product relies on fragmented data access patterns and lacks standardized APIs and tooling.

This role offers the opportunity to design APIs intentionally with a focus on clear contracts, predictable performance, and strong observability, improving developer experience and enabling teams to ship faster and more safely. This team will be the primary owner of product-facing web APIs. As the platform matures, the Web Platform team will design, implement, and maintain the majority of new web APIs, while providing a stable foundation that other teams can integrate with and extend when appropriate.

You will work closely with frontend and backend teams to define integration patterns, guide API usage, and ensure the platform scales with real-world data volumes and access patterns.

What You’ll Bring
Key Attributes
Strong ownership mindset, owning API design and implementation from initial design through production, iteration, and long-term maintenance.
Pragmatic approach to system design, balancing ideal architecture with real-world constraints
Ability to design performance-aware APIs with intentional constraints that scale safely
Strong collaborator who works with frontend & backend teams toward better performance and integration outcomes
Long-term perspective on maintainability, extensibility, and developer experience
Experience We Value
6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong backend or platform focus
Proven experience designing APIs for high-volume or data-intensive product workflows
Experience implementing and integrating APIs with a Ruby on Rails application
Familiarity with modern API paradigms (REST, Graph

QL, or gRPC), including their performance and operational tradeoffs

Experi…