Backend Engineer Billing

Staff Backend Engineer – Payments & Billing

Join to apply for the Staff Backend Engineer – Payments & Billing role at Scribd, Inc.

About The Company At Scribd, 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 four products:
Everand, Scribd, Slideshare, and Fable.

We support a culture where employees can be real and bold, debate, and commit as we embrace plot twists and prioritize the customer. Flexibility and intentional in-person moments are key, and occasional in-person attendance is required for all employees.

• 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 multiple 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 a culture of technical excellence while driving scalable, resilient, and observable financial systems that enable teams to move fast, simplify complexity, and deliver revenue with confidence.
• Modernize legacy systems and eliminate technical debt to improve velocity and scalability.
• Partner with Product, Finance, Risk, Platform, and Analytics to deliver secure, reliable financial flows, leveraging data, metrics, and telemetry to uncover trends, resolve anomalies, and guide the team with clarity and foresight.
• Mentor engineers, shape cross‑team technical strategy, and tackle some of the hardest scaling and security challenges in the company.

• Has 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with deep expertise in building and scaling distributed systems for financial or mission‑critical workloads.
• Brings a strong foundation in data modeling, transactional consistency, and high‑throughput architectures, with hands‑on SQL (e.g., MySQL, Postgre
  
  SQL) and familiarity with No
  
  SQL and caching.
• Is skilled in observability and reliability practices: defining SLOs, implementing metrics/alerts, debugging distributed systems, and leading incident response.
• Has 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.
• Has a proven track record of technical leadership: setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and driving large‑scale migrations or modernization efforts.
• Communicates clearly and collaborates across product, finance, risk, and platform teams, influencing both technical and business decisions.
• Contributes to cross‑team initiatives (mentoring, architecture review groups, knowledge sharing) that shape Scribd’s engineering culture.

• Has strong coding ability in Ruby.
• Has deep experience designing and operating payment or billing systems.
• Has integrated with major payment service providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, Pay Pal) and managed multi‑currency or local payment methods.
• Brings knowledge of compliance and security standards (PCI DSS, encryption, tokenization).
• Understands fraud prevention strategies (chargebacks, retries, card fingerprinting, abuse detection).
• Has led large‑scale migrations between payment providers or billing systems with minimal customer impact.

At Scribd, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package and is determined within a range. Our pay ranges are based on the local cost of labor benchmarks for each specific role, level, and geographic location. San Francisco is our highest geographic market in the United States. In the state of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $167,000 to $260,500.

In the United States, outside of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $137,500 to $247,500. In Canada, the reasonably expected salary range is between…