Staff Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

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.

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 team and role:

• Core Infrastructure builds and operates the foundations of Scribd Inc.: the paved roads of cloud infrastructure networking databases and observability that let every product team move fast with confidence. Over the past two years our charter has grown and today we own the Content Library the unified storage and governance platform for all content across Scribd Slideshare Everand and Fable.

• The Content Library is one of the more interesting storage problems youll find anywhere. Nearly twenty years of accumulated content hundreds of billions of objects in S3 served to hundreds of millions of people every month. It provides transactional storage dataset transforms with full lineage tracking low-latency online reads and the governance layer (access control trust deletion propagation) for our most valuable asset: the content that powers our products and our inference-driven features.

• The core of the platform is written in Rust and built on the excellent Rust data ecosystem (Apache Arrow Parquet and DataFusion) with a Python userland that teams across the company contribute to directly. If you want a taste of the work read about Content Crush on our tech blog: role will join an existing team of Senior Staff and Principal engineers building the Content Library and Core Infrastructure of Scribd Inc. for all our production datastores. Working alongside the Content Librarys architect and lead engineer youll take ownership of the application codebase drive feature development forward and help shape where the platform goes as it becomes the foundation for all content at Scribd Inc.

About you:

• Youre a systems engineer who loves owning software end-to-end: design implementation deployment operations and the inevitable why is this slow investigations.

• Youre pragmatic about technology choices; you keep things simple and you write things down. Design docs runbooks and thoughtful code reviews are how you scale yourself.

• You enjoy being the engineer other teams come to whether thats reviewing their contributions unblocking an integration or turning an ambiguous ask into well-scoped work.

• Youve made agentic AI tools part of your daily engineering practice and you know they accelerate great engineers rather than replace engineering judgment. Humans stay in the loop on quality security and ownership.

What you will do:

• Design build and operate the Content Librarys core Rust services (transactional storage transform coordination and low-latency retrieval paths) at the scale of hundreds of billions of objects.

• Own features end-to-end from technical design through implementation testing deployment and production operations (observability on-call and incident response for the systems you own).

• Evolve the Python userland (the transform framework tooling and developer experience) and support engineers across the company who build on the platform through code reviews guidance and well-designed APIs.

• Lead cross-functional projects with stakeholders in ML search product and data teams: defining roadmaps milestones and technical designs that balance scalability performance cost and delivery.

• Drive performance and cost-efficiency across the stack: query execution (DataFusion) Parquet file layouts S3 access patterns caching strategies and PostgreSQL/Aurora tuning.

• Strengthen the platforms governance capabilities: data lineage authorization and access controls and deletion propagation across brands.

• Raise the engineering bar on the team through mentorship design reviews and improvements to our developer environment including making agentic AI workflows more effective within our codebase while preserving quality security and ownership.

Requirements:

• 10 years of professional software engineering experience building backend distributed or data-intensive systems.

• Production experience writing Rust and strong proficiency in Python.

• A deep understanding of storage and data fundamentals: object storage (S3) columnar formats (Apache Parquet/Arrow) and relational databases (PostgreSQL and/or MySQL).

• A track record of designing and operating high-throughput low-latency services including the operational side: metrics tracing alerting and debugging production systems.

• Demonstrated technical leadership: leading projects across team boundaries writing design docs that build alignment and mentoring engineers.

• Experience with AWS (e.g. S3 Lambda ECS Aurora) and infrastructure-as-code workflows (e.g. Terraform).

• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders and comfort turning ambiguous requirements into shipped software.

Ideally you have:

• Direct experience with Apache DataFusion arrow-rs the parquet crate or building query engines and database internals.

• Contributions to open source especially in the Rust data ecosystem (delta-rs Arrow DataFusion etc.).

• Experience with data governance at scale: lineage access control GDPR and deletion compliance.

• A FinOps mindset: youve bent a cloud bill downward through architecture not just instance right-sizing.

• Experience building platforms that other engineers build on: SDKs contribution models and paved-road developer experience.

• Recent hands-on investment in agentic engineering practices using tools like Claude Code as a core part of your development workflow while keeping human review at the center of quality and security.

--
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 the state of California the reasonably expected salary range is between $176500 minimum salary in our lowest geographic market within California to $275000 maximum salary in our highest geographic market within California.

In the United States outside of California the reasonably expected salary range is between $145000 minimum salary in our lowest US geographic market outside of California to $261500 maximum salary in our highest US geographic market outside of California.

In Canada the reasonably expected salary range is between $184500 CADminimum salary in our lowest geographic market to $244500 CADmaximum salary in our highest geographic market.

We carefully consider a wide range of factors when determining compensation including but not limited to experience; job-related skill sets; relevant education or training; and other business and organizational needs. The salary range listed is for the level at which this job has been the event that you are considered for a different level a higher or lower pay range would apply. This position is also eligible for a competitive equity ownership and a comprehensive and generous benefits package.

Are you currently based in a location where Scribd Inc. can employ you
Employees must have their primary residence in or near one of the following cities. This includes surrounding metro areas or locations within a typical commuting distance:

United States:

Atlanta Austin Boston Dallas Denver Chicago Houston Jacksonville Los Angeles Miami New York City Phoenix Portland Sacramento Salt Lake City San Diego San Francisco Seattle Washington D.C.

Canada:

Ottawa Toronto Vancouver

Mexico:

Mexico City

Benefits at Scribd Inc.

• 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

Get to Know Scribd Inc.
About Scribd Inc.
Life at Scribd Inc.

We want our interview process to be accessible to everyone. You can inform us of any reasonable adjustments we can make to better accommodate your needs by emailing about the need for adjustments at any point in the interview process.

If you apply for a job with Scribd or otherwise engage with us in connection with employment (including as an employee contractor or other personnel) the personal information we process in that context is subject to our Employee and Applicant Privacy Policy which is available here.

Scribd Inc. is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race color religion national origin gender sexual orientation age marital status veteran status disability status or any other characteristic protected by law. We encourage people of all backgrounds to apply and believe that a diversity of perspectives and experiences create a foundation for the best ideas. Come join us in building something meaningful.

Required Experience:

Staff IC