Senior Backend Engineer; Python

At Scribd, our mission is to spark human curiosity and democratize the exchange of ideas. We build a world of stories, knowledge, and collective expertise across four products:
Scribd, Slideshare, Everand, and Fable.

We’re seeking a Senior Software Engineer with deep experience building event-driven, distributed, and scalable systems in Python. In this role, you’ll design and optimize large-scale data and service pipelines on AWS to support Scribd’s content enrichment and metadata systems, integrating machine learning models where needed. This opportunity lets you work on generative AI and metadata enrichment problems at a truly global scale.

• Python 3.9+ (backend services, ML integration)
• AWS services:
  Lambda, ECS, SQS, Elasti Cache, Cloud Watch, SNS
• Orchestration and observability:
  Airflow, Spark, Databricks, Datadog
• Infrastructure-as-code:
  Terraform, Terragrunt
• Databases:
  Dynamo
  
  DB, Postgres, Redis

• Lead design, implementation, and scaling of event-driven, distributed systems to extract, enrich, and process metadata from large-scale document and media datasets.
• Partner with Data Science, ML Engineering, Infrastructure, Product, and Data Science teams to architect robust systems that balance scalability, high performance, and rapid iteration.
• Build and maintain scalable APIs and backend services for high-throughput content processing.
• Leverage AWS services to design and deploy resilient, high-performance systems.
• Optimize and refactor existing backend systems for scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Ensure system health and data integrity through monitoring, observability, and automated testing.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to engineers across the organization, driving secure coding best practices.
• Contribute to the team’s engineering strategy, identifying gaps, proposing new initiatives, and improving existing frameworks.

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience focused on backend or distributed systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python (5+ years). Experience with Scala is a plus.
• Expertise in designing and architecting large-scale event-driven and distributed systems.
• Strong cloud expertise with AWS services: ECS, Lambda, SQS, SNS, Cloud Watch, etc.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform.
• Solid understanding of system performance, profiling, and optimization.
• Experience leading technical projects and mentoring engineers.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.
• Bonus:
  Familiarity with Spark, Databricks, and workflow orchestration tools.
• Bonus:
  Experience integrating ML or LLM-based models into production systems.

Base pay ranges are determined within a local cost of labor benchmark for each specific role, level, and geographic location. For the San Francisco market, the expected salary range is $146,500 to $228,000. Outside California, the range is $120,000 to $217,000. In Canada, the range is $153,000 CAD to $202,000 CAD.

• Healthcare Insurance Coverage (Medical/Dental/Vision): 100% paid for employees
• 12 weeks paid parental leave
• Short-term/long-term disability plans
• 401(k/RSP matching
• Onboarding stipend for home office peripherals + accessories
• Learning & Development allowance and programs
• Quarterly stipend for Wellness, WiFi, etc.
• Mental Health support & resources
• Free subscription to our suite of products
• Referral Bonuses
• Book Benefit
• Sabbaticals
• Company-wide events and team engagement budgets
• Vacation & Personal Days, Paid Holidays (plus winter break)
• Flexible Sick Time and Volunteer Day
• Company-wide Employee Resource Groups and inclusive workplace programs
• Access to AI Tools: free best-in-class AI tools to boost productivity and innovation

We want our interview process to be accessible to everyone. You can inform us of any reasonable adjustments we can make by emailing  about the need for adjustments at any point in the interview process. Scribd is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

We encourage people of all backgrounds to apply, and believe that a diversity of perspectives and experiences create a foundation for the best ideas. Come join us in building something meaningful.