Software Engineer; Backend), Content Foundations

Position: Software Engineer (Backend), Content Foundations
About Scribd
Scribd, Inc. is on a mission to advance human understanding. Our four products — Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable — help billions of people across the globe move beyond access and into insight, application, and expertise.

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 information, and empower collective expertise through our three products:
Everand, Scribd, and Slideshare.

Culture at Scribd, Inc.
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 the best work happens when individual flexibility is balanced with meaningful community connection. Scribd Flex empowers employees to choose the workstyle and location that support their best performance, while committing to intentional in-person moments that strengthen collaboration and culture. Occasional in-person attendance is required for all Scribd, Inc. employees, regardless of location.

At Scribd, Inc., we hire for “GRIT.” Traditionally defined as the intersection of passion and perseverance toward long-term goals, GRIT reflects the mindset we expect from every employee. For us, it also serves as a practical framework for how we work: setting and achieving Goals, delivering Results within your role, contributing Innovative ideas and solutions, and strengthening the broader Team through collaboration and attitude.

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

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

What You’ll Do

Contribute to core content systems:
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.

Build reliable, observable systems:
Implement production‑quality services that handle diverse file formats, malformed inputs, retries, asynchronous workflows, and edge cases.

Collaborate across teams:
Partner with ML Engineering, Search & Discovery, the Content Library squad, and Product to build systems that balance performance, scalability, and user experience.

Improve content quality and discoverability:
Work with ML and Discovery teams to enable improvements in metadata extraction, classification, and enrichment that power personalization and search.

Leverage AI‑driven engineering practices:
Use LLM‑based systems and AI coding agents in your day‑to‑day work, and share your learnings with the team.

Grow your craft:
Learn the domain deeply, take on increasingly ambitious problems, and develop your craft intentionally.

Who You Are

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…