Senior Engineering Manager, Backend (Content Foundations)

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 Content Foundations is a newly formed team at the center of Scribd, Inc.'s biggest strategic investment. Behind our UGC brands (Scribd and Slideshare) sits one of the largest corpora of human-created knowledge anywhere: hundreds of millions of documents and presentations. Every piece of that knowledge passes through one system. It's uploaded, understood, transformed, and served to millions of customers, and agents that cite it, ground it, and learn from it. Content Foundations owns that system, and its work lands in two places at once. It powers the product roadmap: faster uploads, richer document experiences, and the growth of the corpus. And it operates as a platform for the teams that build on it: trust & safety, content understanding, supply, and AI platform teams all consume its interfaces. What this team ships translates directly into product outcomes for users and velocity for every team downstream. Content sits at the very top of Scribd, Inc.'s strategy: it's the engine of our consumer brands and the foundation of our growth, and the ingestion platform is where all of it begins. About The Role We're hiring the engineering manager for Content Foundations to build and lead the team that owns how content enters Scribd. This is a leadership role at the intersection of large-scale data infrastructure and applied AI, and it carries three responsibilities in equal measure. You’ll be the technical leader for the platform: setting the vision for real-time, AI-native ingestion, making the architectural calls that evolve a live, high-scale system, and holding the quality and reliability bar for a system the whole company depends on. You’ll be the people leader for the team: hiring, growing, and inspiring a group of backend and AI data engineers, and shaping its culture, standards, and identity from its first days. And you’ll be the partner the content organization plans around: running the team's roadmap as a product, making commitments other teams can build against, and representing the platform in decisions with product and engineering leaders across the company. The industry is redefining what document ingestion means. Documents can now be parsed, classified, safety-checked, and enriched in real time at the moment of upload, before they ever reach a reader, with vision-language models and intelligent chunking replacing what OCR and batch pipelines used to approximate. You’ll bring those capabilities into one of the world's largest document platforms, with the corpus scale to make it matter. What You’ll Do Own the vision and strategy for how content enters Scribd, and lead the evolution of one of the world's largest document platforms into a real-time, AI-native ingestion system. Build state-of-the-art AI into the heart of the platform, partnering with ML and AI teams so that every document is understood, trusted, and enriched by intelligent systems from the moment it arrives, and is ready for both human readers and AI agents. Turn platform capability into product impact, partnering with product to deliver the supply-side roadmap, make our content discoverable by readers, groundable by AI assistants and create visible wins for the contributors who grow the corpus. Lead, grow, and inspire a founding team of backend and AI data engineers, shaping its culture, hiring, technical standards, and career growth from day one. Run the team as a product, defining the roadmap, priorities, and commitments that teams across the content organization plan against, and building the operational excellence of a system the whole company depends on. Champion security as first-class design principles, building a platform that safely processes untrusted content at massive scale and safeguards the corpus. Influence across the organization, partnering with senior product and engineering leaders across trust & safety, content understanding, supply, and AI platform teams to sequence one shared content mission. You Have 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years leading backend, data‑infrastructure, or platform engineering teams. Depth in high-throughput distributed systems and data pipelines: streaming and event-driven architectures, ingestion and transformation at scale, and the judgment to evolve a live, high-volume system toward real time while it keeps running. Enthusiasm for applied AI in production systems, with experience (or strong intent) integrating ML models, LLM‑based document processing. A platform-product mindset: you've built systems other teams and product surfaces depend on, and you know how to design interfaces, SLAs. A security‑minded approach to building systems: you design for safe handling of untrusted input, least‑privilege access, and data protection from the start. Operational excellence: reliability, observability, and on‑call health are first‑class engineering work for you. Clear, direct communication with product, engineering, and cross‑functional partners. Preferred Skills Experience with document processing at scale: conversion pipelines, vision‑language parsing, PDF and rich‑document formats, media transcoding, or content‑serving and streaming systems. Familiarity with RAG and retrieval infrastructure, such as chunking strategies, embedding pipelines, vector search, or grounding systems for LLMs and agents. Experience on UGC or marketplace platforms where content quality, trust, and scale intersect. Founding‑manager experience: standing up a new team and its platform from a blank page. At Scribd, Inc. At Scribd, Inc. your base pay is one part of your total compensation package and is determined within a range. Our pay ranges are based on the local cost of labor benchmarks for each specific role, level, and geographic location. San Francisco is our highest geographic market in the United States. In the state of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $187,5000 [minimum salary in our lowest geographic market within California] to $281,500 [maximum salary in our highest geographic market within California]. In the United States, outside of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $154,500 [minimum salary in our lowest US geographic market outside of California] to $267,500 [maximum salary in our highest US geographic market outside of California]. In Canada, the reasonably expected salary range is between $198,000 CAD[minimum salary in our lowest geographic market] to $252,500 CAD[maximum salary in our highest geographic market]. We carefully consider a wide range of factors when determining compensation, including but not limited to experience; job‑related skill sets; relevant education or training; and other business and organizational needs. The salary range listed is for the level at which this job has been scoped. In the event that you are considered for a different level, a higher or lower pay range would apply. This position is also eligible for a competitive equity ownership, and a comprehensive and generous benefits package. Are you currently based in a location where Scribd, Inc. can employ you? Employees must have their primary residence in or near one of the following cities. This includes surrounding metro areas or locations within a typical commuting distance: United States Atlanta Austin Boston Dallas Denver Chicago Houston Jacksonville Los Angeles Miami New York City Phoenix Portland Sacramento Salt Lake City San Diego San Francisco Seattle Washington D.C. Canada Ottawa Toronto Vancouver Mexico Mexico City Benefits At Scribd, Inc. 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 We want our interview process to be accessible to everyone. You can inform us of any reasonable adjustments we can make to better accommodate your needs by emailing View email address on click.appcast.io about the need for adjustments at any point in the interview process. 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