Principal Engineer ( AI + Dev Tooling)

Scribd, Inc.•San Francisco, CA

6d•$167,000 - $316,500

About The Position

Scribd, Inc. is hiring a Principal Engineer for its Developer Tooling team. The team builds and evolves tools, frameworks, and platforms used throughout the software development lifecycle, with the goal of improving engineering productivity and developer experience across the company. The role owns the technical vision for agentic engineering at Scribd, including how engineers work with coding agents to write, review, and ship code across the company’s technology stack. The Principal Engineer sets the roadmap and investment priorities, establishes technical direction and standards, and works with the CTO and engineering leadership to make agentic engineering a lasting company advantage. This position has a broad remit and significant ambiguity, with responsibility for turning cross-organizational problems into initiatives and carrying them through delivery. The successful candidate will shape internal tools, libraries, platforms, architectures, patterns, and guardrails across codebases, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure. They will also mentor senior and staff engineers, help teams make effective use of coding agents, and roll out new capabilities across engineering.

Requirements

At least 10 years of software engineering experience, including experience operating at Staff or Principal level.
Hands-on experience applying AI to real software problems, including shipping, measuring, or meaningfully advancing agentic developer tooling in production.
Knowledge of agentic systems, including agent runtimes and harnesses, tool use, context management, and evaluations for determining whether changes are effective.
A record of organization-wide technical impact, including setting lasting technical direction and mentoring senior and staff engineers.
Ability to explain complex technical ideas clearly to leadership and engineering teams.
Significant experience in developer experience, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering.

Responsibilities

Define architecture, patterns, and guardrails for engineers and coding agents working across the codebase, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure, and set future direction.
Set direction for Scribd’s internal tools, libraries, and platforms, establishing standards used across the company.
Partner with engineering leaders to frame ambiguous, cross-organizational problems as initiatives and own them from framing through delivery.
Mentor staff and senior engineers.
Coach teams to make greater use of coding agents in their everyday workflows.
Roll out new capabilities throughout the engineering organization.
Work directly with the CTO and engineering leadership on agentic engineering strategy.

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.
Scribd Flex flexible work model.