Senior Backend Engineer; Python + Distributed systems

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About the Company:

Scribd (pronounced “scribbed”) is on a mission to spark human curiosity. We create a world of stories and knowledge, democratizing the exchange of ideas through our products—Everand, Scribd, Slideshare, and Fable. We foster a culture where employees are real, bold, and customer‑centric, embracing flexibility through our Scribd Flex benefit while prioritizing intentional in‑person collaboration.

The ML Data Engineering team powers metadata extraction, enrichment, and content understanding across all Scribd brands. We process hundreds of millions of documents and billions of images, delivering high‑quality metadata that enables content discovery and trust for millions of users worldwide.

We’re seeking a Senior Software Engineer with deep experience building event‑driven, distributed, scalable systems in Python. In this role you’ll design and optimize large‑scale data and service pipelines on AWS, support Scribd’s content enrichment and metadata systems, and collaborate cross‑functionally to integrate machine learning models and LLM‑based components. This position offers an opportunity to work on cutting‑edge generative AI at a truly global scale.

Python is the core language. AWS services such as Lambda, ECS, SQS, and Elasti Cache support event‑driven and distributed processing. We also use Airflow, Spark, Databricks, Terraform, and Datadog for orchestration, data processing, and observability.

• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to engineers across the organization, promoting secure coding best practices.
• Design, implement, and scale event‑driven, distributed systems to process metadata from large‑scale document and media datasets.
• Partner with Data Science, Infrastructure, ML Engineering, and Product teams to architect robust systems that balance scalability, performance, and rapid iteration.
• Contribute to the team’s engineering strategy, identify gaps, propose new initiatives, and improve existing frameworks.
• Build and maintain scalable APIs and backend services for high‑throughput content processing.
• Leverage AWS services (ECS, Lambda, SQS, Elasti Cache, Cloud Watch) 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.

• 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 data processing frameworks (Spark, Databricks) and workflow orchestration tools.
• Bonus: experience integrating ML or LLM‑based models into production systems.

Salary ranges vary by location. In San Francisco: $146,500 to $228,000. Outside California: $120,000 to $217,000. In Canada: $153,000‑$202,000 CAD. Pay is determined by experience, skill set, education, and business needs. The role also includes competitive equity and a comprehensive benefits package.

Employees must have their primary residence in or near one of our listed cities to be eligible for employment. Selected locations include major U.S. cities (e.g., Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle), Canadian cities (Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver), and Mexico City.

• Healthcare insurance coverage (medical, dental, vision) 100% paid for employees.
• 12 weeks paid parental leave.
• Short‑term and long‑term disability plans.
• 401(k)/RSP matching.
• Onboarding stipend for…