Principal Engineer ( AI + Dev Tooling)

Scribd•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Scribd, Inc. is hiring a Principal Engineer for its Developer Tooling team. The role defines the company’s technical vision for agentic engineering: how engineers work alongside coding agents to write, review, and ship code across the technology stack. The Principal Engineer will determine investment priorities, set technical direction, and deliver tools and capabilities that engineers use across the company, working directly with the CTO and engineering leadership. The Developer Tooling team builds and evolves tools, frameworks, and platforms across the software development lifecycle, including infrastructure, build and deployment processes, and agentic engineering capabilities. This role carries broad organizational impact, with responsibility for internal tools and standards that improve engineering productivity and developer experience.

Requirements

10 or more years of software engineering experience, including experience operating at Staff or Principal level.
Hands-on experience applying AI to real software problems.
Experience shipping, measuring, or meaningfully advancing agentic developer tooling in production, and staying current as the field evolves.
Depth in agentic systems, including agent runtimes and harnesses, tool use, context management, and evaluations.
A track record of organization-wide technical impact, including setting enduring technical direction, mentoring senior and staff engineers, and explaining complex technical ideas clearly to leadership and engineering colleagues.
Significant experience in developer experience, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering.

Responsibilities

Define the architecture, patterns, and guardrails for engineers and coding agents working across the codebase, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure.
Set technical direction for Scribd’s internal tools, libraries, and platforms, establishing standards used across the company.
Partner with engineering leaders to turn ambiguous, cross-organizational problems into initiatives and own them from problem framing through delivery.
Mentor staff and senior engineers and coach teams to use coding agents effectively in their daily workflows.
Roll out new capabilities across the engineering organization.
Set the technical vision and roadmap for agentic engineering at Scribd.

Benefits

Competitive equity ownership.
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.
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.