Software Engineer (Backend), Content Foundations
About The Position
The Content Foundations team at Scribd, Inc. is responsible for building and maintaining the systems that handle content uploading, processing, and delivery across Scribd products. This includes ingestion, metadata extraction, quality controls, and the core components that power search, recommendations, AI/ML systems, and the reading/listening experience. The role involves working with a hybrid catalog of premium publisher content and user-generated uploads, dealing with diverse formats and evolving systems. Current focus areas include improving the upload flow, content quality validation, OCR and content extraction for ML/LLM use cases, evolving content formats for AI workflows, and making content/metadata more accessible.
Requirements
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including exposure to production-scale systems.
- Experience with backend services, data pipelines, or content-processing systems (depth in any one is sufficient).
- Comfortable working with messy data and building systems resilient to real-world inputs.
- Proficient in at least one of Ruby, Python, or Go, and willing to ramp up on the others.
- Working familiarity with AWS (e.g., Lambda, SQS/SNS, S3) or similar cloud resources.
- Comfortable working with relational databases (SQL).
- Clear written and verbal communicator, able to collaborate with teammates and partner teams.
- Collaborative and curious, eager to learn from peers and contribute back.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with document formats (PDF, ebooks, markdown) and internals (parsing, OCR, transformation).
- Familiarity with ML/AI systems (embeddings, chunking, retrieval pipelines).
Responsibilities
- Design and implement features within ingestion pipelines, metadata services, and content processing workflows.
- Build reliable, observable systems that handle diverse file formats, malformed inputs, retries, asynchronous workflows, and edge cases.
- Collaborate with ML Engineering, Search & Discovery, the Content Library squad, and Product to build systems that balance performance, scalability, and user experience.
- Work with ML and Discovery teams to enable improvements in metadata extraction, classification, and enrichment that power personalization and search.
- Use LLM-based systems and AI coding agents in day-to-day work and share learnings with the team.
- Learn the domain deeply, take on increasingly ambitious problems, and develop craft intentionally.
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
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
