Scribd
Staff Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure
San Francisco · Staff+ · Contract
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 65 days ago
PythonRustCode ReviewPostgreSQLMySQLAWSCloud PlatformsTerraformMachine LearningAgentic AIIncident ResponseComplianceSystems EngineeringLeadershipCommunicationCollaborationMentoring
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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
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About the role
- Our four products - Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable - help billions of people across the globe move beyond access and into insight, application, and expertise.
- 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
- Design, build, and operate the Content Library's core Rust services (transactional storage, transform coordination, and low-latency retrieval paths) at the scale of hundreds of billions of objects.
- Own features end-to-end, from technical design through implementation, testing, deployment, and production operations (observability, on-call, and incident response for the systems you own).
- Evolve the Python userland (the transform framework, tooling, and developer experience) and support engineers across the company who build on the platform through code reviews, guidance, and well-designed APIs.
- Lead cross-functional projects with stakeholders in ML, search, product, and data teams: defining roadmaps, milestones, and technical designs that balance scalability, performance, cost, and delivery.
- Drive performance and cost-efficiency across the stack: query execution (DataFusion), Parquet file layouts, S3 access patterns, caching strategies, and PostgreSQL/Aurora tuning.
- Raise the engineering bar on the team through mentorship, design reviews, and improvements to our developer environment, including making agentic AI workflows more effective within our codebase while preserving quality, security, and ownership.
- This role will join an existing team of Senior, Staff, and Principal engineers building the Content Library and Core Infrastructure of Scribd, Inc. for all our production datastores.
- Working alongside the Content Library's architect and lead engineer, you'll take ownership of the application codebase, drive feature development forward, and help shape where the platform goes as it becomes the foundation for all content at Scribd, Inc.
- Lead cross-functional projects with stakeholders in
- We encourage people of all backgrounds to apply, and believe that a diversity of perspectives and experiences create a foundation for the best ideas.
Requirements
- Production experience writing Rust and strong proficiency in Python.
- A track record of designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency services, including the operational side: metrics, tracing, alerting, and debugging production systems.
- Experience with AWS (e.g., S3, Lambda, ECS, Aurora) and infrastructure-as-code workflows (e.g., Terraform).
- Ideally, you have:
- Direct experience with Apache DataFusion, arrow-rs, the parquet crate, or building query engines and database internals.
- Experience with data governance at scale: lineage, access control, GDPR and deletion compliance.
- Employees must have their primary residence in or near one of the following cities.
Compensation
- At Scribd, Inc. your base pay is one part of your total compensation package and is determined within a range.
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
- Learning and development programs and professional growth opportunities
- Wellness and home office stipends
- Scribd Flex (flexible work model)
Company info
- Core Infrastructure builds and operates the foundations of Scribd, Inc.: the paved roads of cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and observability that let every product team move fast with confidence. Over the past two years, our charter has grown, and today we own the Content Library, the unified storage and governance platform for all content across Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable.
- The Content Library is one of the more interesting storage problems you'll find anywhere. Nearly twenty years of accumulated content, hundreds of billions of objects in S3, served to hundreds of millions of people every month. It provides transactional storage, dataset transforms with full lineage tracking, low-latency online reads, and the governance layer (access control, trust, deletion propagation) for our most valuable asset: the content that powers our products and our inference-driven features.
- The core of the platform is written in Rust and built on the excellent Rust data ecosystem (Apache Arrow, Parquet, and DataFusion), with a Python "userland" that teams across the company contribute to directly.
- Recent, hands-on investment in agentic engineering practices, using tools like Claude Code as a core part of your development workflow while keeping human review at the center of quality and security.
This listing is sourced directly from Scribd's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.