Scribd, Inc. · 5 hours ago
Senior Backend Engineer (Python + Distributed systems)
San Diego, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level
$146K/yr - $228K/yr
7+ years expScribd Inc. is dedicated to sparking human curiosity through its diverse products. They are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design and optimize large-scale data and service pipelines, focusing on event-driven and distributed systems in Python to support content enrichment and metadata systems.
AudiobooksBooksEBooksFile SharingNewsPodcastPublishing
Responsibilities
Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to engineers across the organization, driving secure coding best practices
Lead the design, implementation, and scaling of event-driven, distributed systems to extract, enrich, and process metadata from large-scale document and media datasets
Partner with Data Science, Infrastructure, ML Engineering, and Product teams to architect and deliver robust systems that balance scalability, high performance, and rapid iteration
Contribute to the team’s engineering strategy, identifying gaps, proposing new initiatives, and improving existing frameworks
Build and maintain scalable APIs and backend services for high-throughput content processing
Leverage AWS services (ECS, Lambda, SQS, ElastiCache, CloudWatch) to design and deploy resilient, high-performance systems
Optimize and refactor existing backend systems for scalability, reliability, and performance
Ensure system health and data integrity through monitoring, observability, and automated testing
Qualification
Required
7+ years of professional software engineering experience with a focus on backend or distributed systems development
Strong proficiency in Python (5+ years). Experience with Scala is a plus
Expertise in designing and architecting large-scale event-driven and distributed systems
Strong cloud expertise with AWS services (ECS, Lambda, SQS, SNS, CloudWatch, etc.)
Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform
Solid understanding of system performance, profiling, and optimization
Experience leading technical projects and mentoring engineers
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience
Preferred
Familiarity with data processing frameworks (Spark, Databricks) and workflow orchestration tools
Experience integrating ML or LLM-based models into production systems
Benefits
Healthcare Insurance Coverage (Medical/Dental/Vision): 100% paid for employees
12 weeks paid parental leave
Short-term/long-term disability plans
401k/RSP matching
Onboarding stipend for home office peripherals + accessories
Learning & Development allowance
Learning & Development programs
Quarterly stipend for Wellness, WiFi, etc.
Mental Health support & resources
Free subscription to the Scribd Inc. suite of products
Referral Bonuses
Book Benefit
Sabbaticals
Company-wide events
Team engagement budgets
Vacation & Personal Days
Paid Holidays (+ winter break)
Flexible Sick Time
Volunteer Day
Company-wide Employee Resource Groups and programs that foster an inclusive and diverse workplace.
Access to AI Tools: We provide free access to best-in-class AI tools, empowering you to boost productivity, streamline workflows, and accelerate bold innovation.
Company
Scribd, Inc.
We're on a mission to spark human curiosity.
201-500 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Scribd, Inc. has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (5)
2024 (2)
2023 (8)
2022 (3)
2021 (12)
2020 (15)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$106.75MKey Investors
Spectrum EquityKhosla VenturesCRV
2019-11-25Series E· $58M
2015-01-02Series D· $23M
2011-01-18Series C· $12M
Leadership Team
Tony Grimminck
Chief Executive Officer
Adrian Lienhard
VP, Infrastructure Engineering
Recent News
TechCrunch
2025-12-11
2025-10-21
Company data provided by crunchbase