Senior Engineering Manager, Backend (Content Foundations)
About The Position
Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for the newly formed Content Foundations team. This team is central to Scribd's strategic investments and owns the system responsible for uploading, understanding, transforming, and serving content across Scribd's products. The role involves technical leadership for a large-scale data infrastructure and applied AI platform, people leadership for a team of backend and AI data engineers, and strategic partnership within the content organization. The position will focus on evolving the content ingestion system into a real-time, AI-native platform, integrating advanced AI capabilities, and driving product impact through platform development. The manager will be responsible for building and shaping the founding team, defining the roadmap, ensuring operational excellence, and championing security principles.
Requirements
- 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years leading backend, data-infrastructure, or platform engineering teams.
- Depth in high-throughput distributed systems and data pipelines: streaming and event-driven architectures, ingestion and transformation at scale, and the judgment to evolve a live, high-volume system toward real time while it keeps running.
- Enthusiasm for applied AI in production systems, with experience (or strong intent) integrating ML models, LLM-based document processing.
- A platform-product mindset: you've built systems other teams and product surfaces depend on, and you know how to design interfaces, SLAs.
- A security-minded approach to building systems: you design for safe handling of untrusted input, least-privilege access, and data protection from the start.
- Operational excellence: reliability, observability, and on-call health are first-class engineering work for you.
- Clear, direct communication with product, engineering, and cross-functional partners.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with document processing at scale: conversion pipelines, vision-language parsing, PDF and rich-document formats, media transcoding, or content-serving and streaming systems.
- Familiarity with RAG and retrieval infrastructure, such as chunking strategies, embedding pipelines, vector search, or grounding systems for LLMs and agents.
- Experience on UGC or marketplace platforms where content quality, trust, and scale intersect.
- Founding-manager experience: standing up a new team and its platform from a blank page.
Responsibilities
- Own the vision and strategy for how content enters Scribd, and lead the evolution of one of the world's largest document platforms into a real-time, AI-native ingestion system.
- Build state-of-the-art AI into the heart of the platform, partnering with ML and AI teams so that every document is understood, trusted, and enriched by intelligent systems from the moment it arrives, and is ready for both human readers and AI agents.
- Turn platform capability into product impact, partnering with product to deliver the supply-side roadmap, make our content discoverable by readers, groundable by AI assistants and create visible wins for the contributors who grow the corpus.
- Lead, grow, and inspire a founding team of backend and AI data engineers, shaping its culture, hiring, technical standards, and career growth from day one.
- Run the team as a product, defining the roadmap, priorities, and commitments that teams across the content organization plan against, and building the operational excellence of a system the whole company depends on.
- Champion security as first-class design principles, building a platform that safely processes untrusted content at massive scale and safeguards the corpus.
- Influence across the organization, partnering with senior product and engineering leaders across trust & safety, content understanding, supply, and AI platform teams to sequence one shared content mission.
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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
