Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Everand Core

Scribd, Inc. is on a mission to advance human understanding through products including Everand, which helps people discover and engage with books and other content. The Staff Software Engineer will set technical direction for the Everand backend, own platform reliability and health, modernize legacy systems, and build scalable systems supporting discoverability, personalization, experimentation, and core reading and listening experiences. The role also involves mentoring engineers and collaborating with Product, Design, Analytics, Web, Mobile, and ML teams.

Responsibilities:

• Your main focus will be to set technical direction for the Everand backend: writing and socializing design documents, driving architecture reviews, and turning ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design
• Own backend reliability and platform health, including staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, and observability
• Raise the ceiling for the team through PR review, mentorship, pairing, and by setting a high bar on design, testing, and ops
• Be the Everand backend voice in cross-team planning, and the glue in cross-functional execution
• Foster a culture of technical excellence while driving scalable, resilient, and observable systems that let teams move fast, simplify complexity, and deliver with confidence
• Modernize legacy systems and eliminate technical debt to improve velocity and scalability
• Partner with Product, Design, Analytics, and Web, Mobile, and ML Engineers to deliver backend systems that support experimentation and a single source of truth across platforms, using data, metrics, and telemetry to uncover trends, resolve anomalies, and guide the team with clarity and foresight
• Champion a user-first mindset, grounding technical decisions in how they enhance the reading and listening experience

Requirements:

• You bring significant experience in backend engineering, with a strong track record building and scaling distributed systems
• You write clean, maintainable, and secure code in at least one modern backend language such as Ruby (preferred), Scala, Go, or Python
• You have a keen eye for reliability and observability, and care about defining SLOs, implementing metrics and alerts, and debugging distributed systems
• You have a proven track record of technical leadership: setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and driving large-scale migrations or modernization efforts
• You thrive in cross-functional collaboration, holding your own with senior PM, design, and ML partners, and caring more about the system landing well than about being right
• You enjoy mentoring, knowledge-sharing, and contributing to cross-team initiatives, including architecture review groups and design discussions that shape Scribd, Inc.'s engineering culture
• You care deeply about the users; understanding what makes Everand impactful in their daily lives and translating that empathy into the systems you build
• Employees must have their primary residence in or near one of the following cities. This includes surrounding metro areas or locations within a typical commuting distance: United States: Atlanta | Austin | Boston | Dallas | Denver | Chicago | Houston | Jacksonville | Los Angeles | Miami | New York City | Phoenix | Portland | Sacramento | Salt Lake City | San Diego | San Francisco | Seattle | Washington D.C. Canada: Ottawa | Toronto | Vancouver Mexico: Mexico City
• 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