Software Engineer; Backend), Content Foundations

About the Team & Role

The Content Foundations team builds the systems that power how content is uploaded, processed, and delivered across Scribd products. This includes everything from ingestion, metadata extraction, early quality controls, and the core artifacts that power search, recommendations, AI/ML systems, and the reading and listening experience.

Why this role is interesting: You’ll be joining an experienced team working at the boundary between messy, real‑world content and highly structured systems, where file formats vary and metadata inconsistencies become amplified ibd operates a hybrid catalog of premium publisher content and user‑generated uploads, spanning diverse formats, decade‑old systems, and modern services evolving alongside them. Your contributions will directly impact downstream teams and ultimately our customers.

Current focus areas include:

• Improvements to upload flow
• Content quality and early‑stage validation
• OCR and content extraction for downstream ML/LLM use cases
• Evolving content formats to support downstream AI workflows
• Making content and metadata more accessible for downstream systems to consume

• Design and implement features within ingestion pipelines, metadata services, and content processing workflows, with guidance from senior engineers and the EM on scope and trade‑offs.
• Implement production‑quality services that handle diverse file formats, malformed inputs, retries, asynchronous workflows, and edge cases.
• Partner with ML Engineering, Search & Discovery, the Content Library squad, and Product to build systems that balance performance, scalability, and user experience.
• Work with ML and Discovery teams to enable improvements in metadata extraction, classification, and enrichment that power personalization and search.
• Use LLM‑based systems and AI coding agents in your day‑to‑day work, and share your learnings with the team.
• Learn the domain deeply, take on increasingly ambitious problems, and develop your craft intentionally.

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including exposure to production‑scale systems.
• Experience with backend services, data pipelines, or content‑processing systems, depth in any one of these is enough.
• Comfortable working with messy data and building systems resilient to real‑world inputs.
• Proficient in at least one of Ruby, Python, or Go, and willing to ramp up on the others (our stack includes all three).
• Working familiarity with AWS (e.g., Lambda, SQS/SNS, S3) or similar cloud resources.
• Comfortable working with relational databases (SQL).
• Clear written and verbal communicator, able to collaborate with teammates and partner teams.
• Collaborative and curious, eager to learn from peers and contribute back.

• Experience with document formats (PDF, e‑books, markdown) and internals (parsing, OCR, transformation).
• Familiarity with ML/AI systems (embeddings, chunking, retrieval pipelines).

• Scribd Flex (flexible work model)
• 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
• Complimentary access to the Scribd, Inc. suite of products
• Enterprise access to leading AI tools

In California: $126,000 – $196,000. Outside California, United States: $103,500 – $186,500. In Canada: $131,500 CAD – $174,500 CAD.

Employees must have their primary residence in or near one of the following cities. This includes surrounding metro areas or locations within a typical commuting distance.

• United States:
  Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Houston, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C.
• Canada:
  Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver
• Mexico:
  Mexico City

We encourage people of all backgrounds to apply, and believe that a diversity of perspectives and experiences create a foundation for the best ideas. Come join us in building something meaningful.