Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Fable Core

Scribd•San Francisco, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Fable Core is the backend, infrastructure, and platform team behind Fable – a social reading product now part of Scribd, Inc. Fable is a leading platform for everything related to books and reading: find your next book, join a book club, build a reading habit. We care deeply about building a great experience for our growing community of 1M+ monthly active users. The Fable app has often been featured in the App Store, both as App Of The Day and the Essential Book Apps list. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Fable Core team, you will set technical direction for the Fable backend and own the reliability and health of the platform that powers the product. You will partner with product, design, ML, and infrastructure partners to turn ambiguous product intent into durable backend systems, lead incident response end-to-end, and raise the ceiling for the team through design leadership and mentorship. We are a small team with broad scope - every position on the team is high-impact. Our stack: Python/Django, Postgres, Kubernetes, Datadog, GCP / AWS.

Requirements

10+ years of backend experience, including meaningful time in Python/Django and at least one other stack (Go, Node, Java/Kotlin, or similar).
Experience operating production systems on a major cloud – OLTP databases at scale, container orchestration, queueing, and CI/CD.
A track record of owning incidents end-to-end, including the follow-through.
The ability to write a TDD that a staff peer trusts and a product lead can understand, and to turn ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design.
Strong cross-functional collaboration skills – you hold your own with senior PM, design, and ML partners, and you care more about the system landing than about being right.
A pragmatic default paired with a strong systems instinct – you look for root causes, not symptoms.
Hands-on experience with agentic engineering tools and workflows in a real production setting.

Nice To Haves

Experience with subscription and entitlements systems (Stripe, RevenueCat, App Store / Play billing).
Experience leading a platform or infra function through a migration (on-prem→cloud, AWS↔GCP, monolith→services, or similar).
Experience working alongside ML teams on recommendation or feed systems.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for the Fable backend – write and socialize technical design documents, drive architecture reviews, and turn ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design.
Own backend reliability and platform health, including staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, and observability.
Lead incident response and drive durable postmortems – write the doc, run the meeting, and make sure action items actually ship.
Be the Fable backend voice in cross-team planning and the glue in cross-functional execution.
Raise the ceiling for the team through PR review, mentorship, pairing, and by setting a high bar on design, testing, and ops.
Build and evolve the Fable backend platform so the team can ship faster and more safely.
Bring agentic engineering practices into the team’s day-to-day work and help the team adopt them effectively.

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