Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Everand Core

About Scribd, Inc.

Scribd, Inc. aims to enhance human understanding worldwide through its products Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable, supporting billions to gain insight, apply knowledge, and achieve expertise.

Our culture encourages authenticity, boldness, open debate, and commitment while adapting to change. Employees are empowered to act with customer focus. We balance flexibility with meaningful in-person collaboration, requiring occasional onsite attendance for all employees regardless of location.

We hire for "GRIT" — representing passion and perseverance toward long-term goals, achieved by setting goals, delivering results, innovating, and strengthening teamwork.

Role Overview

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Everand Core team in Toronto, you will define and advance the backend architecture that supports Everand’s web and mobile platforms, responsible for features including discovery, personalization, and core content services. Collaboration extends across engineers in search, recommendations, web, mobile, design, and product. The role focuses on building performant, reliable, scalable, and maintainable systems while shaping the backend technology roadmap.

Key Responsibilities

• Establish technical direction through design documentation, architectural evaluations, and converting product goals into practical backend solutions.
• Ensure backend platform stability, managing staging environments, CI/CD pipelines, databases, queues, cost controls, and system observability.
• Enhance team expertise by reviewing code, mentoring peers, pairing on development, and setting rigorous standards for design and operations.
• Represent the backend team in cross-functional planning and coordinate execution alongside product, design, and other engineering teams.
• Promote technical excellence by driving the creation of scalable, resilient, and observable infrastructures that simplify complexity and enable rapid delivery.
• Modernize outdated systems and reduce technical debt to enhance development velocity and scalability.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Analytics, Web, Mobile, and ML teams to implement backend capabilities that facilitate experimentation and maintain a unified data source, leveraging metrics and telemetry to guide improvements.
• Champion a user-centric approach by grounding architecture and implementation decisions on enhancing the reading and listening experiences.

Required Qualifications

• Extensive experience with backend engineering, demonstrating expertise building and scaling distributed systems.
• Proficient in writing clean, maintainable, and secure code in modern backend languages such as Ruby (preferred), Scala, Go, or Python.
• Strong focus on system reliability and observability, including defining Service Level Objectives, implementing monitoring and alerting, and troubleshooting distributed architectures.
• Proven technical leadership skills including architectural guidance, mentorship, and leading significant modernization or migration projects.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across disciplines, engaging with senior product managers, designers, and ML engineers, prioritizing system success over personal correctness.
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to company-wide architectural and design discussions.
• Deep empathy for end users and commitment to building impactful products that improve daily experiences.

Preferred Skills

• Advanced proficiency in Ruby programming.
• Experience enhancing reliability, latency, or throughput in large-scale distributed environments.
• Prior work involving collaboration with machine learning teams on recommendation or content feed systems.
• Familiarity with experimentation frameworks and feature-flagging tools.

Compensation and Location

Compensation is determined by geographic location, experience, skills, education, and business needs. The Canadian salary range is approximately CAD 179,000 to CAD 228,500 annually. Competitive equity and comprehensive benefits supplement base pay.

The position is onsite in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, but additional opportunities exist in Canadian metros and selected U.S. cities.

Benefits

• Flexible work model (Scribd Flex)
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
• Mental health support and disability coverage
• Generous paid leave, including vacation, sick days, holidays, winter breaks, volunteer time, and sabbaticals
• Paid parental and family support benefits
• Retirement matching and employee stock options
• Learning and professional development programs
• Wellness and home office stipends
• Access to Scribd product suite and advanced AI tools

Diversity and Inclusion

The company is committed to equal employment opportunities without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability, or other protected characteristics and strives to foster a diverse workforce.

Accessibility

Adjustments can be made during the interview process to accommodate candidate needs.