Scribd
Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Fable Core
San Francisco · Staff+ · Contract
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 84 days ago
PythonJavaKotlinNode.jsDjangoPostgreSQLAWSGCPKubernetesCI/CDDatadogMachine LearningIncident ResponseLeadershipCollaborationMentoring
About the role
- Fable Core is the backend, infrastructure, and platform team behind Fable - a social reading product now part of Scribd, Inc.
- The Fable app has often been featured in the App Store, both as App Of The Day and the Essential Book Apps list.
- We are a small team with broad scope - every position on the team is high-impact.
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for the Fable backend - write and socialize technical design documents, drive architecture reviews, and turn ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design.
- Lead incident response and drive durable postmortems - write the doc, run the meeting, and make sure action items actually ship.
- Raise the ceiling for the team through PR review, mentorship, pairing, and by setting a high bar on design, testing, and ops.
- Build and evolve the Fable backend platform so the team can ship faster and more safely.
- The ability to write a TDD that a staff peer trusts and a product lead can understand, and to turn ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design.
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills - you hold your own with senior PM, design, and ML partners, and you care more about the system landing than about being right.
Requirements
- Our four products - Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable - help billions of people across the globe move beyond access and into insight, application, and expertise.
- Employees must have their primary residence in or near one of the following cities.
- Hands-on experience with agentic engineering tools and workflows in a real production setting.
Nice to have
- Experience with subscription and entitlements systems (Stripe, RevenueCat, App Store / Play billing).
- Experience leading a platform or infra function through a migration (on-prem→cloud, AWS↔GCP, monolith→services, or similar).
- Experience working alongside ML teams on recommendation or feed systems.
- 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.
- Canada: Alberta, New Brunswick
Skills
- This posting reflects an approved, open position within the organization.
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
- Own backend reliability and platform health, including staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, and observability.
- Scribd Flex (flexible work model)
This listing is sourced directly from Scribd's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.