Staff Backend Engineer (Payments and Billing)

Scribd, Inc.•Vancouver, BC

About The Position

The Staff Backend Engineer will lead the architecture, implementation, and operation of Scribd's payments and billing systems, which support its subscription business across Scribd, Everand, Slideshare, and Fable. The role owns billing lifecycles, global payment processing, invoicing, reconciliation, and financial reliability, working with payment providers and supporting international currencies and local payment methods. It also drives compliance and security for financial systems, including PCI DSS controls, tokenization, encryption, and secure data handling. The engineer will lead agentic engineering within the team, incorporating AI agents into design, implementation, testing, debugging, and operations while maintaining strict standards for human review, correctness, and security. This includes building shared agent skills and operational resources for activities such as alert triage and incident investigation, establishing safe practices for AI-assisted changes in PCI scope, and contributing reusable tools and skills to Scribd's shared marketplace. The position also focuses on modernizing legacy systems, reducing technical debt, and improving the scalability, observability, and resilience of financial services. The engineer partners with Product, Finance, Risk, Platform, and Analytics; mentors other engineers; and shapes technical strategy and engineering practices across teams.

Requirements

8+ years of backend engineering experience, with 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 databases 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 a focus on clean, maintainable, secure code.
Hands-on experience using agentic engineering tools and workflows in a production setting, including daily use of AI agents, the ability to explain tool choices, and an understanding of their limitations.
Ability to rigorously validate AI-generated code, protect sensitive data, recognize when work needs deeper investigation or should not be delegated to an agent, and take ownership of all shipped code.
Proven technical leadership, including setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and driving large-scale migrations or modernization efforts.
Experience improving a team's 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 the ability to influence technical and business decisions.
Participation in 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.
Experience integrating with major payment service providers such as Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, or PayPal, and managing multiple currencies or local payment methods.
Knowledge of compliance and security standards such as PCI DSS, encryption, and tokenization.
Understanding of fraud prevention strategies, including 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, secrets or PII leaking 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 that support 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 requirements through PCI DSS practices, tokenization, encryption, and secure data handling.
Lead the team's use of AI agents across design, implementation, testing, debugging, and operations, and help adopt workflows that improve speed without compromising correctness or security.
Build shared AI capabilities for payments, such as agent skills for alert triage, incident investigation, and anomaly detection, along with reliable runbooks, documentation, and context.
Contribute reusable agent skills to Scribd's shared skills marketplace rather than creating one-off tools.
Define guardrails for AI-assisted changes in PCI scope, including human review, protection of cardholder and sensitive data, and testing and verification standards for AI-generated code.
Promote technical excellence and deliver scalable, resilient, and observable financial systems.
Modernize legacy systems and reduce technical debt to improve development velocity and scalability, using AI agents where appropriate to accelerate migrations, refactors, and test coverage.
Partner with Product, Finance, Risk, Platform, and Analytics to deliver secure, reliable financial flows, using data, metrics, and telemetry to identify trends, resolve anomalies, and guide decisions.
Mentor engineers, shape cross-team technical strategy, and address complex scaling and security challenges.
Raise the team's standards for designing, reviewing, and verifying AI-assisted work.

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.