Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Everand Core

About Scribd, Inc.

Scribd, Inc. is dedicated to advancing human understanding worldwide through its diverse suite of products including Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable. These platforms reach billions globally, helping users move beyond mere access to knowledge and towards insight, application, and expertise.

Company Culture

At Scribd, employees are encouraged to be authentic and courageous, engaging in constructive debates and embracing changes with commitment. The organization empowers individuals to take initiative with a strong focus on customer-centric priorities. Scribd promotes balancing personal flexibility with meaningful community engagement through its Scribd Flex policy, which allows employees to select workstyles and locations that maximize their productivity, while still requiring occasional in-person collaboration to foster partnership and culture.

Core Values - GRIT

Scribd hires candidates embodying "GRIT," defined as the combination of passion and perseverance aimed at long-term objectives. GRIT guides work behaviors such as goal setting, achieving impactful results, fostering innovation, and promoting teamwork.

Role Overview

The Staff Software Engineer on the Everand Core team will play a pivotal role in transforming how people discover, organize, and engage with books. You will own the backend services that power Everand's web and mobile experiences, enabling rapid experimentation, discoverability, personalization, and core content consumption. You will collaborate closely with engineers in search, recommendations, mobile, and web platforms, alongside design and product teams, aligning technology choices with user needs and platform capabilities. Your contributions will focus on building performant, reliable, and scalable backend systems while influencing the team's technical direction.

Responsibilities

• Define and advocate the technical vision for the Everand backend, including drafting design documents, conducting architecture reviews, and translating product goals into backend implementations.
• Manage platform reliability and health aspects such as staging environments, continuous integration/deployment pipelines, databases, messaging queues, cost optimization, and system observability.
• Elevate team standards through code reviews, mentorship, pair programming, and by enforcing rigorous design, testing, and operational practices.
• Serve as the backend representative in cross-team strategic planning and facilitate collaboration across diverse functions.
• Drive a culture of engineering excellence, building scalable, robust, and observable systems that enable rapid development and reduce complexity.
• Lead modernization initiatives to replace legacy systems and reduce technical debt, thereby enhancing development velocity and scalability.
• Partner with product, design, analytics, as well as web, mobile, and machine learning engineering teams to develop backend systems that support experimentation and unify data sources, leveraging metrics and telemetry to identify trends and address issues proactively.
• Embed a user-centered perspective in technical decisions to improve reading and listening experiences.

Qualifications and Desired Experience

• Extensive backend engineering experience with a proven history of building and scaling distributed systems.
• Proficiency in writing clean, maintainable, and secure code in one or more modern backend languages, such as Ruby (preferred), Scala, Go, or Python.
• Strong focus on system reliability and monitoring, including defining Service Level Objectives (SLOs), implementing metrics and alerts, and debugging complex distributed architectures.
• Demonstrated leadership in technical strategy, including mentoring fellow engineers and directing large-scale system migrations or modernization projects.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with senior product managers, designers, and machine learning engineers, prioritizing system success over individual correctness.
• Passion for mentoring and sharing knowledge, contributing to cross-team architectural discussions and fostering a collaborative engineering culture.
• Deep empathy for users that informs system design, understanding Everand's role in enhancing users’ daily experiences.

Additional Preferred Skills

• Advanced coding skills in Ruby.
• Experience improving performance aspects — such as reliability, latency, or throughput — in large distributed systems.
• Background collaborating with machine learning teams on recommendation or feed systems.
• Familiarity with experimentation frameworks and feature-flagging platforms.

Location & Employment Details

The position is for full-time onsite work, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with eligibility for candidates residing in certain US metros (e.g., Atlanta, Boston, Seattle), Canadian cities (Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver), and Mexico City. Occasional in-person attendance is required to support collaboration and culture.

Compensation and Benefits

Salary ranges vary by location, with expected ranges for Canada from CAD 179,000 to CAD 225,000 annually. The overall compensation package includes competitive equity ownership and a comprehensive benefits program comprising flexible work models, health and vision insurance, mental health support, paid time off, parental leave, retirement matching, professional development, wellness stipends, and complimentary product access.

Equal Opportunity & Accessibility

Scribd is committed to creating an inclusive workplace and provides reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process. The company welcomes applicants of all backgrounds and identities to contribute diverse perspectives and ideas.