Senior Backend Engineer; Python + Distributed systems

Senior Backend Engineer (Python + Distributed systems)

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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 products:
Everand, Scribd, Slideshare, and Fable.

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.

We believe in balancing individual flexibility and community connections. Our flexible work benefit, Scribd Flex, allows employees – in partnership with their manager – to choose the daily work-style that best suits them. Intentional in-person moments are emphasized, and occasional in-person attendance is required for all employees.

We hire for “GRIT”. GRIT stands for Goals, Results, Innovative ideas, and Team. We look for people who can set and achieve goals, deliver results, contribute innovative ideas, and positively influence the broader team.

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 to enable content discovery and trust for users worldwide.

Our systems operate at massive scale, supporting diverse datasets like user-generated content (UGC), ebooks, and audio books. We work at the intersection of machine learning, data engineering, and distributed systems, collaborating closely with research and product teams to deploy scalable ML and LLM-powered solutions in production.

We’re seeking a Senior Software Engineer with deep experience building event-driven, distributed, and scalable systems in Python. In this role, you’ll design and optimize large-scale data and service pipelines running on AWS, supporting Scribd’s content enrichment and metadata systems. You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams to design reliable backend services that integrate machine learning models and LLM-based components when needed. This role offers the opportunity to work on cutting-edge generative AI and metadata enrichment problems at a truly global scale.

Our backend systems are built primarily in Python, leveraging AWS services such as Lambda, ECS, SQS, and Elasti Cache for 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, driving secure coding best practices.
• Lead the design, implementation, and scaling of event-driven, distributed systems to extract, enrich, and process metadata from large-scale document and media datasets.
• Partner with Data Science, Infrastructure, ML Engineering, and Product teams to architect and deliver robust systems that balance scalability, high performance, and rapid iteration.
• Contribute to the team’s engineering strategy, identifying gaps, proposing new initiatives, and improving existing frameworks.
• Build and maintain scalable APIs and backend services for high-throughput content processing.
• Leverage AWS services (ECS, Lambda, SQS, Elasti Cache) 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…