Backend Engineer Billing

Staff Backend Engineer – Payments & Billing

2 days ago Be among the first 25 applicants

About The Company At Scribd (pronounced “scribbed”), our mission is to spark human curiosity. Join our team as we create a world of stories and knowledge, democratize the exchange of ideas and information, and empower collective expertise through our three products:
Everand, Scribd, and Slideshare.

We support a culture where our employees can be real and be bold; where we debate and commit as we embrace plot twists; and where every employee is empowered to take action as we prioritize the customer. Scribd Flex allows employees to choose a daily work-style in partnership with their manager, balancing individual flexibility with community connections. Occasional in-person attendance is required for all Scribd employees, regardless of location.

We hire for GRIT — goals, results, innovative ideas, and teamwork. We are looking for someone who demonstrates the ability to set and achieve goals, achieve results, contribute innovative ideas, and positively influence the broader team through collaboration and attitude.

About The Team The Payments & Billing team powers Scribd’s subscription revenue engine, delivering systems that manage billing life cycles, global payment processing, and financial reliability across Scribd, Everand, Slideshare, and Fable. Focus areas include payment processing at scale, invoicing, reconciliation, fraud prevention, compliance, and support for international currencies and payment methods. We partner with Product, Finance, Risk, and Platform Engineering to ensure millions of readers can reliably access our services.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the technical architecture and implementation of Scribd’s payments and billing systems, the backbone of our subscription business.
• Design, build, and operate backend services that power subscription payments at global scale.
• Own billing lifecycle, global payments, invoicing, reconciliation, and financial reliability—integrating with providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree) and supporting international currencies and local methods.
• Ensure compliance and security of financial systems through PCI DSS, tokenization, encryption, and secure data handling.
• Foster technical excellence while driving scalable, resilient, and observable financial systems that enable teams to move fast and deliver revenue with confidence.
• Modernize legacy systems and reduce technical debt to improve velocity and scalability.
• Partner with Product, Finance, Risk, Platform, and Analytics to deliver secure, reliable financial flows, using data, metrics, and telemetry to identify trends, resolve anomalies, and guide the team.
• Mentor engineers, shape cross-team technical strategy, and tackle hard scaling and security challenges.

We’re Looking For Someone Who

• Has 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with deep expertise in building and scaling distributed systems for financial or mission-critical workloads.
• Strong foundation in data modeling, transactional consistency, and high-throughput architectures, with hands-on SQL (MySQL, Postgre
  
  SQL) and familiarity with No
  
  SQL and caching.
• Skilled in observability and reliability practices: defining SLOs, implementing metrics/alerts, debugging distributed systems, and leading incident response.
• Strong coding ability in at least one modern backend language such as Ruby (preferred), Java, Go, or Python, with a focus on clean, maintainable, and secure code.
• Proven track record of technical leadership: setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and driving large-scale migrations or modernization efforts.
• Clear communication and collaboration across product, finance, risk, and platform teams, influencing technical and business decisions.
• Contributes to cross-team initiatives that shape Scribd’s engineering culture.

It’s a Plus If You

• Have strong coding ability in Ruby.
• Have deep experience designing and operating payment or billing systems.
• Have integrated with major payment service providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, Pay Pal) and managed multi-currency or local payment methods.
• Know compliance and security standards (PCI DSS, encryption, tokenization).
• Understand…