Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Scribd, Inc. is on a mission to advance human understanding through its innovative products. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Fable Core team to set technical direction and ensure the reliability of the backend platform that supports their social reading product.
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for the Fable backend – write and socialize technical design documents, drive architecture reviews, and turn ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design
- Own backend reliability and platform health, including staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, and observability
- Lead incident response and drive durable postmortems – write the doc, run the meeting, and make sure action items actually ship
- Be the Fable backend voice in cross-team planning and the glue in cross-functional execution
- Raise the ceiling for the team through PR review, mentorship, pairing, and by setting a high bar on design, testing, and ops
- Build and evolve the Fable backend platform so the team can ship faster and more safely
- Bring agentic engineering practices into the team’s day-to-day work and help the team adopt them effectively
Skills
- 10+ years of backend experience, including meaningful time in Python/Django and at least one other stack (Go, Node, Java/Kotlin, or similar)
- Experience operating production systems on a major cloud – OLTP databases at scale, container orchestration, queueing, and CI/CD
- A track record of owning incidents end-to-end, including the follow-through
- The ability to write a Technical Design Document (TDD) that a staff peer trusts and a product lead can understand, and to turn ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills – you hold your own with senior PM, design, and ML partners, and you care more about the system landing than about being right
- A pragmatic default paired with a strong systems instinct – you look for root causes, not symptoms
- Hands-on experience with agentic engineering tools and workflows in a real production setting
- Experience with subscription and entitlements systems (Stripe, RevenueCat, App Store / Play billing)
- Experience leading a platform or infra function through a migration (on-prem→cloud, AWS↔GCP, monolith→services, or similar)
- Experience working alongside ML teams on recommendation or feed systems
Benefits
- Scribd Flex (flexible work model)
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
- Mental health support and disability coverage
- Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick time, holidays, winter break, volunteer time, and sabbaticals
- Paid parental leave and family support benefits
- Retirement matching and employee equity
- Learning and development programs and professional growth opportunities
- Wellness and home office stipends
- Complimentary access to the Scribd, Inc. suite of products
- Enterprise access to leading AI tools
- Occasional in-person attendance is required for all Scribd, Inc. employees, regardless of location
Company Overview