Senior Backend Engineer; Python

Senior Backend Engineer (Python + Distributed Systems)

Scribd, Inc.

At Scribd (pronounced “scribbed”), our mission is to spark human curiosity. We create a world of stories and knowledge, democratize the exchange of ideas, and empower collective expertise through our 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 each 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, lets employees choose a daily work‑style that suits their needs while prioritizing intentional in‑person moments.

Occasional in‑person attendance is required for all employees, regardless of location. We hire for “GRIT” – the intersection of passion, perseverance, goals, results, innovative ideas, and positive influence.

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 millions of users worldwide. Our systems operate at massive scale, supporting diverse datasets across user‑generated content, eBooks, audio books, and more. We collaborate closely with applied 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 on AWS, support Scribd’s content enrichment and metadata systems, and work closely with cross‑functional teams to integrate machine learning models and LLM components as needed. This position offers the opportunity to work on cutting‑edge generative AI and metadata enrichment problems at a global scale.

Python, AWS services (Lambda, ECS, SQS, Elasti Cache, Cloud Watch), Airflow, Spark, Databricks, Terraform, Datadog

• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to engineers across the organization, driving secure coding best practices.
• Design, implement, and scale event‑driven, distributed systems to extract, enrich, and process metadata from large‑scale document and media datasets.
• Collaborate with Data Science, Infrastructure, ML Engineering, and Product teams to architect and deliver robust systems that balance scalability, performance, and rapid iteration.
• Contribute to 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, 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 with a focus 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.

Base pay ranges are determined by local cost of labor benchmarks. For San Francisco, the range is $146,500–$228,000; outside California, $120,000–$217,000; in Canada, CAD…