Backend Software Engineer; Python

About The Company

At Scribd (pronounced “scribbed”), our mission is to spark human curiosity. We create a world of stories and knowledge, democratizing the exchange of ideas and information, and empowering collective expertise through our four products:
Everand, Scribd, Slideshare, and Fable. We support a culture where employees can be real, bold, debate, commit, embrace plot twists, and prioritize the customer. Our flexible work benefit, Scribd Flex, lets employees and managers choose the daily work‑style that best suits their needs while ensuring intentional in‑person moments to build collaboration, culture, and connection. Occasional in‑person attendance is required for all Scribd employees, regardless of location.

We hire for “GRIT”—the intersection of passion and perseverance toward long‑term goals—and we look for individuals who demonstrate the ability to set and achieve Goals, deliver Results, contribute Innovative ideas and solutions, and influence the broader Team positively.

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 that enables content discovery and trust for millions of users worldwide. Our systems operate at massive scale, supporting diverse datasets such as user‑generated content, e‑books, and audio books. We collaborate with applied research and product teams to deploy scalable ML and LLM‑powered solutions in production.

We’re seeking a Software Engineer II 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 primarily built 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.

• Design and implement event‑driven, distributed systems to extract, enrich, and process metadata from large‑scale document and media datasets.
• 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.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to deliver backend solutions that power ML‑driven features.
• Optimize and refactor existing backend systems for scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Ensure system health and data integrity through monitoring, observability, and automated testing.

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience on Python or distributed systems development.
• Strong proficiency in Python (3+ years). Experience with Scala is a plus.
• Proven experience designing and building event‑driven, distributed, and scalable systems.
• Hands‑on experience 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.
• 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.

In the United States, the reasonably expected salary range for San Francisco (our highest geographic market in the U.S.) is between $126,000 and $196,000. Outside California, it ranges from $103,500 to $186,500. In Canada, the range is between $131,500 CAD and $174,500 CAD. Salary ranges are based on local cost of…