Staff Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure
About The Position
Core Infrastructure builds and operates the foundations of Scribd, Inc.: the paved roads of cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and observability that let every product team move fast with confidence. Over the past two years, our charter has grown, and today we own the Content Library, the unified storage and governance platform for all content across Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable. The Content Library is one of the more interesting storage problems you'll find anywhere. Nearly twenty years of accumulated content, hundreds of billions of objects in S3, served to hundreds of millions of people every month. It provides transactional storage, dataset transforms with full lineage tracking, low-latency online reads, and the governance layer (access control, trust, deletion propagation) for our most valuable asset: the content that powers our products and our inference-driven features. The core of the platform is written in Rust and built on the excellent Rust data ecosystem (Apache Arrow, Parquet, and DataFusion), with a Python "userland" that teams across the company contribute to directly. If you want a taste of the work, read about Content Crush on our tech blog: https://tech.scribd.com/blog/2026/content-crush.html This role will join an existing team of Senior, Staff, and Principal engineers building the Content Library and Core Infrastructure of Scribd, Inc. for all our production datastores. Working alongside the Content Library's architect and lead engineer, you'll take ownership of the application codebase, drive feature development forward, and help shape where the platform goes as it becomes the foundation for all content at Scribd, Inc.
Requirements
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend, distributed, or data-intensive systems.
- Production experience writing Rust and strong proficiency in Python.
- A deep understanding of storage and data fundamentals: object storage (S3), columnar formats (Apache Parquet/Arrow), and relational databases (PostgreSQL and/or MySQL).
- A track record of designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency services, including the operational side: metrics, tracing, alerting, and debugging production systems.
- Demonstrated technical leadership: leading projects across team boundaries, writing design docs that build alignment, and mentoring engineers.
- Experience with AWS (e.g., S3, Lambda, ECS, Aurora) and infrastructure-as-code workflows (e.g., Terraform).
- Clear communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and comfort turning ambiguous requirements into shipped software.
Nice To Haves
- Direct experience with Apache DataFusion, arrow-rs, the parquet crate, or building query engines and database internals.
- Contributions to open source, especially in the Rust data ecosystem (delta-rs, Arrow, DataFusion, etc.).
- Experience with data governance at scale: lineage, access control, GDPR and deletion compliance.
- A FinOps mindset: you've bent a cloud bill downward through architecture, not just instance right-sizing.
- Experience building platforms that other engineers build on: SDKs, contribution models, and paved-road developer experience.
- Recent, hands-on investment in agentic engineering practices, using tools like Claude Code as a core part of your development workflow while keeping human review at the center of quality and security.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate the Content Library's core Rust services (transactional storage, transform coordination, and low-latency retrieval paths) at the scale of hundreds of billions of objects.
- Own features end-to-end, from technical design through implementation, testing, deployment, and production operations (observability, on-call, and incident response for the systems you own).
- Evolve the Python userland (the transform framework, tooling, and developer experience) and support engineers across the company who build on the platform through code reviews, guidance, and well-designed APIs.
- Lead cross-functional projects with stakeholders in ML, search, product, and data teams: defining roadmaps, milestones, and technical designs that balance scalability, performance, cost, and delivery.
- Drive performance and cost-efficiency across the stack: query execution (DataFusion), Parquet file layouts, S3 access patterns, caching strategies, and PostgreSQL/Aurora tuning.
- Strengthen the platform's governance capabilities: data lineage, authorization and access controls, and deletion propagation across brands.
- Raise the engineering bar on the team through mentorship, design reviews, and improvements to our developer environment, including making agentic AI workflows more effective within our codebase while preserving quality, security, and ownership.
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
