Staff Software Engineer (Backend), Fable Core at Scribd

Role overview

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.

Responsibilities

• Deliver technical work for Fable core backend systems.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, developer and customer teams.
• Improve reliability, testing, documentation and operational quality.
• Translate technical requirements into maintainable software or customer outcomes.

Qualifications

• 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.
• A track record of owning incidents end-to-end, including the follow-through.
• The ability to write a Technical Design Document (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.
• 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.
• In the state of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $171,000 [minimum salary in our lowest geographic market within California] to $267,000 [maximum salary in our highest geographic market within California].
• In the United States, outside of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $141,000 [minimum salary in our lowest US geographic market outside of California] to $254,000 [maximum salary in our highest US geographic market outside of California].
• In Canada, the reasonably expected salary range is between $179,000 CAD[minimum salary in our lowest geographic market] to $228,500 CAD[maximum salary in our highest geographic market].
• 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:
• 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.

Technology in this role

• Python: Python Java AWS GCP Kubernetes .
• Java: Python Java AWS GCP Kubernetes .
• AWS: Python Java AWS GCP Kubernetes .
• GCP: Python Java AWS GCP Kubernetes .
• Kubernetes: Python Java AWS GCP Kubernetes .
• Go: Python Java AWS GCP Kubernetes .
• Kotlin: • 10+ years of backend experience, including meaningful time in Python/Django and at least one other stack (Go, Node, Java/Kotlin, or .
• C: This includes surrounding metro areas or locations within a typical commuting distance: Atlanta | Austin | Boston | Dallas | Denver | Chicago | Houston | Jacksonville | Los Angeles | Miami | New York City | Phoenix | Portland | Sacramento | Salt Lake City | San Diego | San .
• CI/CD: • Own backend reliability and platform health, including staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, and .
• CAN: We support a culture where our employees can be real and be .
• Django: Our stack: Python/Django, Postgres, Kubernetes, Datadog, GCP / .
• Datadog: Our stack: Python/Django, Postgres, Kubernetes, Datadog, GCP / .

Benefits

• 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
• 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 accommodations@scribd.com about the need for adjustments at any point in the interview process.
• If you apply for a job with Scribd, Inc. 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 .

About Scribd

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 you'll 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: https://tech.scribd.com/blog/2026/content-crush.html

This 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 Library's architect and lead engineer, you'll 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.

You're a systems engineer who loves owning software end-to-end: design, implementation, deployment, operations, and the inevitable "why is this slow?" investigations.

You're 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.

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