Staff Backend Engineer (Payments and Billing)

Scribd•San Francisco, CA

19h

About The Position

The Staff Backend Engineer will lead the technical architecture, implementation, and operation of Scribd’s payments and billing systems, which power its subscription business across Scribd, Everand, Slideshare, and Fable. The Payments & Billing team manages subscription billing lifecycles, global payment processing, invoicing, reconciliation, fraud prevention, compliance, and support for international currencies and local payment methods. The role partners with Product, Finance, Risk, Platform Engineering, and Analytics to deliver secure, reliable financial flows and help customers access services reliably worldwide. The team uses AI agents throughout design, implementation, testing, debugging, and operations. The engineer will lead agentic engineering practices, build shared agent skills and context for payments workflows, and establish safe, measurable workflows without compromising correctness or security. Because systems move money and fall within PCI scope, AI-assisted work requires rigorous human review, secure handling of sensitive information, and clear testing and verification standards. The engineer will foster technical excellence, modernize legacy systems, reduce technical debt, and improve system scalability, resilience, and observability. The role also includes mentoring engineers, shaping cross-team technical strategy, and addressing challenging scaling, security, and AI-assisted engineering practices.

Requirements

At least 8 years of backend engineering experience, including deep expertise building and scaling distributed systems for financial or mission-critical workloads.
Strong foundation in data modeling, transactional consistency, and high-throughput architectures.
Hands-on SQL experience, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, and familiarity with NoSQL and caching.
Experience with observability and reliability practices, including defining SLOs, implementing metrics and alerts, debugging distributed systems, and leading incident response.
Strong coding ability in at least one modern backend language such as Ruby, Java, Go, or Python, with an emphasis on clean, maintainable, secure code.
Hands-on experience with agentic engineering tools and workflows in a production setting; daily use of AI agents, ability to explain tool choices, and awareness of their limitations.
Sound judgment in validating AI-generated code, protecting sensitive data, and identifying work that requires deeper investigation or should not be delegated to an agent.
Ability to explain and take ownership of every line of code shipped, regardless of who or what produced it.
Proven technical leadership, including setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and driving large-scale migrations or modernization efforts.
Track record of improving team effectiveness through patterns, tooling, or review practices adopted by others, including practices for AI-assisted development.
Clear communication and collaboration across product, finance, risk, and platform teams, with ability to influence technical and business decisions.
Contributions to cross-team initiatives such as mentoring, architecture review groups, or knowledge sharing.

Nice To Haves

Strong coding ability in Ruby.
Deep experience designing and operating payment or billing systems.
Integrations with payment providers such as Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, or PayPal, and experience with multi-currency payments or local payment methods.
Knowledge of compliance and security standards, including PCI DSS, encryption, and tokenization.
Understanding of fraud prevention strategies such as chargebacks, retries, card fingerprinting, and abuse detection.
Experience leading large-scale migrations between payment providers or billing systems with minimal customer impact.
Experience building agent skills, MCP integrations, or AI-assisted on-call and incident workflows adopted by other engineers.
Experience designing human-in-the-loop or AI code-review and merge controls in a regulated or PCI-scoped environment.
Understanding of AI-specific security risks, including prompt injection, leakage of secrets or PII through agent context or logs, and over-permissioned agent credentials.

Responsibilities

Lead the technical architecture and implementation of payments and billing systems.
Design, build, and operate backend services for subscription payments at global scale.
Own billing lifecycle, global payments, invoicing, reconciliation, and financial reliability, including integrations with payment providers and support for international currencies and local payment methods.
Ensure financial systems meet compliance and security expectations through PCI DSS practices, tokenization, encryption, and secure data handling.
Use AI agents across design, implementation, testing, debugging, and operations, and help the team adopt effective workflows without lowering correctness or security standards.
Build shared AI capabilities for payments, including agent skills for alert triage, incident investigation, and anomaly detection, plus reliable runbooks, documentation, and context; contribute them to the shared skills marketplace.
Define guardrails for AI-assisted changes in PCI scope, including human review, protection of cardholder and sensitive data, and testing and verification standards for generated code affecting money movement.
Drive scalable, resilient, and observable financial systems and promote technical excellence.
Modernize legacy systems and eliminate technical debt to improve velocity and scalability, using AI agents for migrations, refactors, and test coverage where appropriate.
Partner with Product, Finance, Risk, Platform, and Analytics, using data, metrics, and telemetry to identify trends, resolve anomalies, and guide work.
Mentor engineers, shape cross-team technical strategy, and address major scaling and security challenges.
Raise the bar for how the team designs, reviews, and verifies AI-assisted work.

Benefits

Flexible work model (Scribd Flex).
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.