Scribd
Senior Backend Engineer, Content Foundations
Washington, District of Columbia · Senior · Contract
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 141 days ago
PythonRubySQLNoSQLAWSMachine LearningData EngineeringLLMsCollaborationMentoring
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odds of building a lasting career here
40Risky
Cap-exempt (no lottery)0
Sponsors this role90
Entry-level history0
PERM / green-card track0
Lottery odds40
Fits your clock70
Thin sponsorship signal and lottery-bound. A low-probability bet with your clock running. Prioritize cap-exempt roles and proven entry-level sponsors first.
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Files H-1B transfers
8 transfer filings in the last year, covering 8 workers. Median labor-condition decision: 7 days. An employer that already files transfers is one that can take over an existing H-1B.
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About the role
- So what are we looking for in new team members?
- At Scribd, Inc., we hire for "GRIT." Traditionally defined as the intersection of passion and perseverance toward long-term goals, GRIT reflects the mindset we expect from every employee.
Responsibilities
- Own and drive technical initiatives: Lead the design, implementation, and scaling of core content systems, including ingestion pipelines, metadata services, and content processing workflows.
- Build scalable, reliable systems: Design robust solutions that handle diverse file formats and edge cases while maintaining high availability and strong data integrity.
- Collaborate across teams: Partner with Content Security, ML Data Engineering, Search & Discovery, the Content Library squad, and Product to build systems that balance performance, scalability, and user experience.
- Drive platform evolution: Identify architectural opportunities, propose new capabilities, and help evolve Scribd's content platform to meet growing scale and complexity.
- Mentor and lead: Provide technical guidance across teams and help raise the bar on system design, data modeling, and production excellence.
- In addition to building AI into our pipeline, you will help lead the team's adoption of AI coding agents and advanced developer tools to accelerate how we build and scale our systems.
- Evolving content formats to support downstream AI workflows
- Experience building and scaling ingestion pipelines, ETL workflows, or document/content processing systems.
- Comfortable working with messy data and building systems resilient to real-world inputs.
- Strong database design skills (SQL and/or NoSQL), with a focus on reliability and resilience.
Requirements
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, including experience navigating the trade-offs of refactoring legacy systems while maintaining high availability.
- Experience with AWS (Lambda, SQS/SNS, S3, Step Functions) and distributed workflows.
- Our four products - Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable - help billions of people across the globe move beyond access and into insight, application, and expertise.
Nice to have
- Experience with document formats (PDF, ebooks, markdown) and internals (OCR, parsing, transformation).
- Familiarity with ML/AI systems (embeddings, chunking, retrieval pipelines).
- Background in spam or content security systems.
- If you enjoy working on complex, high-scale systems where solving foundational problems unlocks value across an entire ecosystem, we'd love to hear from you.
- San Francisco is our highest geographic market in the United States.
- We carefully consider a wide range of factors when determining compensation, including but not limited to experience
- job-related skill sets
- and other business and organizational needs.
Benefits
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
- Mental health support and disability coverage
- Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick time, holidays, winter break, volunteer time, and sabbaticals
- Paid parental leave and family support benefits
- Retirement matching and employee equity
- Scribd Flex (flexible work model)
This listing is sourced directly from Scribd's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.