Senior Engineering Manager, Backend (Content Foundations)

About Scribd, Inc.

Scribd, Inc. aims to enhance human understanding by providing access to four major products—Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable—that help billions worldwide move beyond access toward insight and expertise.

Company Culture

We foster an environment where employees are encouraged to be authentic and courageous, engage in open debates, and commit to prioritized customer focus. Our Scribd Flex model supports a blend of individualized working styles with meaningful in-person collaboration, requiring occasional onsite presence.

Team Overview

The Content Foundations team is integral to Scribd's strategic investment, managing the core system responsible for processing hundreds of millions of human-created documents and presentations. This team powers product innovations and supports downstream teams such as trust & safety and AI platforms.

Role Summary

You will lead the Content Foundations engineering team, guiding the evolution of one of the largest document ingestion platforms towards a real-time, AI-integrated system. This position encompasses technical leadership, team management, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver impactful product results.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute the vision for real-time, AI-native content ingestion into Scribd.
• Integrate advanced AI capabilities with ML and AI teams to enhance document understanding and enrichment upon upload.
• Translate platform functionalities into product outcomes in partnership with product teams.
• Build and inspire a founding engineering team, establishing culture, standards, and growth paths.
• Manage the team’s roadmap and operational health of a critical platform.
• Embed security as a core design principle for scalable, safe content processing.
• Collaborate across senior engineering and product leaders to harmonize content initiatives.

Required Qualifications

• Over 8 years in software engineering, with at least 3 years leading backend, data infrastructure, or platform teams.
• Expertise in high-throughput distributed systems, streaming architectures, and real-time data ingestion and transformation.
• Strong interest or proven experience in deploying applied AI, including ML model integration and large language model based document handling.
• Experience building platforms that other products depend on, with familiarity in designing interfaces and service-level agreements.
• Security-oriented mindset focusing on safe handling of untrusted inputs and data protection.
• Commitment to operational excellence in system reliability, monitoring, and on-call management.
• Effective communicator across product, engineering, and cross-functional teams.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with document conversion pipelines, vision-language parsing, PDFs, media transcoding, or content streaming systems.
• Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), chunking strategies, embedding pipelines, vector search, or LLM grounding systems.
• Work history on UGC or marketplace platforms balancing content quality, trust, and scalability.
• Experience founding and scaling new engineering teams and platforms.

Location and Compensation

Primary residence must be in or near major metropolitan areas in the United States (e.g., Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco), Canada (Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver), or Mexico City. The role offers competitive pay within location-based salary ranges and equity ownership, alongside a comprehensive benefits package.

Benefits

• Flexible work model with Scribd Flex
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
• Mental health and disability support
• Generous paid time off including holidays and sabbaticals
• Paid parental leave and family benefits
• Retirement matching and employee equity
• Professional development and learning programs
• Wellness and home office stipends
• Free access to Scribd products
• Enterprise AI tool access