Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

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.

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.

So what are we looking for in new team members? 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.

This posting reflects an approved, open position within the organization.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Fable Core is the backend, infrastructure, and platform team behind Fable - a social reading product now part of Scribd, Inc. Fable is a leading platform for everything related to books and reading: find your next book, join a book club, build a reading habit. We care deeply about building a great experience for our growing community of 1M+ monthly active users. The Fable app has often been featured in the App Store, both as App Of The Day and the Essential Book Apps list.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Fable Core team, you will set technical direction for the Fable backend and own the reliability and health of the platform that powers the product. You will partner with product, design, ML, and infrastructure partners to turn ambiguous product intent into durable backend systems, lead incident response end-to-end, and raise the ceiling for the team through design leadership and mentorship. We are a small team with broad scope - every position on the team is high-impact.

• Our stack: Python/Django, Postgres, Kubernetes, Datadog, GCP / AWS.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• 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.

WE'RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WITH

• 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 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.

NICE TO HAVE

• 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.

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At Scribd, Inc., your base pay is one part of your total compensation package and is determined within a range. Our pay ranges are based on the local cost of labor benchmarks for each specific role, level, and geographic location. San Francisco is our highest geographic market in the United States.

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