Staff Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

About the role

Join Scribd’s Core Infrastructure team to build and operate the Content Library, a unified storage and governance platform serving billions of objects across multiple products. You will work on high‑throughput, low‑latency services written in Rust with a Python userland, shaping the foundation for all content at Scribd.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the Content Library’s core Rust services (transactional storage, transform coordination, low‑latency retrieval) at massive scale.
• Own features end‑to‑end, from technical design through implementation, testing, deployment, and production operations.
• Evolve the Python userland, including the transform framework, tooling, and developer experience, and support engineers across the company.
• Lead cross‑functional projects with ML, search, product, and data teams, defining roadmaps, milestones, and technical designs.
• Drive performance and cost‑efficiency across the stack, optimizing query execution, Parquet layouts, S3 access patterns, caching, and database tuning.
• Strengthen governance capabilities such as data lineage, authorization, access controls, and deletion propagation.
• Raise the engineering bar through mentorship, design reviews, and improving developer workflows, including effective use of agentic AI tools.

Required profile

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend, distributed, or data‑intensive systems.
• Production experience writing Rust and strong proficiency in Python.
• Deep understanding of storage fundamentals: object storage (S3), columnar formats (Parquet/Arrow), and relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL).
• Track record of designing and operating high‑throughput, low‑latency services with robust observability.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, including leading cross‑team projects and mentoring engineers.
• Experience with AWS services (S3, Lambda, ECS, Aurora) and infrastructure‑as‑code tools such as Terraform.
• Clear communication skills and ability to turn ambiguous requirements into shipped software.

Required skills

• Rust
• Python
• AWS (S3, Lambda, ECS, Aurora)
• Terraform
• PostgreSQL / MySQL
• Apache Parquet
• Apache Arrow / DataFusion