Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby on Rails/Python) - Content Foundations
About the role
Scribd, Inc. is on a mission to advance human understanding. Our four products — Scribd®, Slideshare®, Everand™, and Fable — help billions of people across the globe move beyond access and into insight, application, and expertise. Culture at Scribd, Inc. We support a culture where our employees can be real and be bold; where we debate and commit as we embrace plot twists; and where every employee is empowered to take action as we prioritize the customer. We believe the best work happens when individual flexibility is balanced with meaningful community connection. Scribd Flex empowers employees to choose the workstyle and location that support their best performance, while committing to intentional in-person moments that strengthen collaboration and culture. Occasional in-person attendance is required for all Scribd, Inc. employees, regardless of location. So what are we looking for in new team members? At Scribd, Inc., we hire for “GRIT.” Traditionally defined as the intersection of passion and perseverance toward long-term goals, GRIT reflects the mindset we expect from every employee. For us, it also serves as a practical framework for
how we work: setting and achieving Goals, delivering Results within your role, contributing Innovative ideas and solutions, and strengthening the broader Team through collaboration and attitude. This posting reflects an approved, open position within the organization.
About
the Team & Role The Content Foundations team builds the systems that power how content enters, evolves, and is delivered across Scribd. This includes everything from ingestion, metadata extraction, early quality controls, and the core artifacts that power search, recommendations, AI/ML systems, and the reading and listening experience. Why this role is interesting: You'll be joining a small and growing team working at the boundary between messy, real-world content and highly structured systems, where file formats vary, metadata can be inconsistent, and scale amplifies every edge case. Scribd operates a hybrid catalog of premium publisher content and user-generated uploads, spanning diverse formats, decade-old systems, and modern services evolving alongside them. Decisions made at ingestion ripple across every downstream system. Current focus areas include: Content quality and early-stage validation Spam detection at upload time OCR and content extraction for ML/LLM use cases Evolving content formats to support downstream AI workflows Security hardening in partnership with Content and Infra-Security Architectural improvements to how content and metadata flow across systems, including improving data observability for complex, asynchronous pipelines What You’ll Do Own and drive technical initiatives: Lead the design, implementation, and scaling of core content systems, including ingestion pipelines, metadata services, and content processing workflows. Build scalable, reliable systems: Design robust solutions that handle diverse file formats and edge cases while maintaining high availability and strong data integrity. Collaborate across teams: Partner with Content Security, ML Data Engineering, Search & Discovery, the Content Library squad, and Product to build systems that balance performance, scalability, and user experience. Improve content quality and discoverability: Work with ML and Discovery teams to improve metadata extraction, classification, and enrichment that power personalization and search. Drive platform evolution: Identify architectural opportunities, propose new capabilities, and help evolve Scribd’s content platform to meet growing scale and complexity. Mentor and lead: Provide technical guidance across teams and help raise the bar on system design, data modeling, and production excellence. Champion AI-driven engineering: Help shape how we leverage AI and LLM-based systems within content processing, while maintaining a high bar for quality and reliability. In addition to building AI into our pipeline, you will help lead
