Senior Software Engineer (Python + Distributed systems)

Position Overview

We’re seeking a Senior Software Engineer with deep experience building event-driven, distributed, and scalable systems in Python. In this role, you’ll design and optimize large-scale data and service pipelines on AWS that support Scribd’s content enrichment and metadata systems. You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams to build reliable backend services that integrate machine learning models and LLM-based components when needed. The ML Data Engineering team powers metadata extraction, enrichment, and content understanding across Scribd’s brands, processing hundreds of millions of documents and billions of images to enable content discovery and trust for millions of users worldwide.

Compensation: Your base pay is determined within a range based on local labor benchmarks. In California, the range is approximately $146,500 to $228,000; in the United States outside of California, it is approximately $120,000 to $217,000; in Canada, the range is approximately $153,000 CAD to $202,000 CAD.

Location: Eligible primary residences include major US cities (e.g., Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C.), select Canadian cities (Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver), and Mexico City.

Key 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 by 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.

Required Qualifications

• 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 Qualifications

• Familiarity with data processing frameworks (Spark, Databricks) and workflow orchestration tools.
• Experience integrating ML or LLM-based models into production systems.

Benefits & Perks

• 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 and 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 fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace
• Access to AI Tools to boost productivity, streamline workflows, and accelerate innovation