Senior Engineering Manager, Backend (Content Foundations)

ScribdIncSan FranciscoEngineering

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Opens the official ScribdInc careers page

Salary

Not listed

Job type

Full-time

Work mode

Remote

Experience

Senior · 8+ yrs

Posted

16 Sept 2026

Status

Open · checked 7d ago

About this role

Senior Engineering Manager, Backend (Content Foundations) is a leadership position based in San Francisco that suits an experienced software engineering manager looking to build and lead a foundational team at the intersection of large-scale data infrastructure and applied AI. This role oversees how content enters Scribd, managing the platform that processes hundreds of millions of documents and presentations.

Role Overview

Senior Engineering Manager, Backend (Content Foundations) is an open position at Scribd, Inc. located in San Francisco. The person in this role serves as the technical leader for the ingestion platform, the people leader for the founding engineering team, and a strategic partner to the content organization.

Key Responsibilities

Own the vision and strategy for how content enters Scribd, evolving the document platform into a real-time, AI-native ingestion system.

Integrate state-of-the-art AI into the platform by partnering with machine learning and AI teams so documents are enriched by intelligent systems from arrival.

Partner with product teams to turn platform capability into product impact, supporting the supply-side roadmap and making content discoverable.

Hire, grow, and inspire a founding team of backend and AI data engineers while shaping its culture, technical standards, and career growth.

Define the team roadmap, priorities, and commitments that other departments plan against while maintaining operational excellence.

Champion security as a first-class design principle to safely process untrusted content at scale.

Influence across the organization by partnering with product and engineering leaders across trust and safety, content understanding, supply, and AI platform teams.

Requirements

Eight or more years of experience in software engineering.

Three or more years of experience leading backend, data-infrastructure, or platform engineering teams.

Depth in high-throughput distributed systems and data pipelines, including streaming, event-driven architectures, and ingestion at scale.

Experience or strong intent in integrating machine learning models and LLM-based document processing into production systems.

A platform-product mindset focused on designing interfaces and SLAs that other teams depend on.

A security-minded approach to building systems that safely handle untrusted input and data protection.

Operational excellence in reliability, observability, and on-call health.

Clear, direct communication skills with product, engineering, and cross-functional partners.

Nice to Have

Experience with document processing at scale, such as conversion pipelines, vision-language parsing, PDF and rich-document formats, media transcoding, or content-serving systems.

Familiarity with RAG and retrieval infrastructure, including chunking strategies, embedding pipelines, vector search, or grounding systems for LLMs and agents.

Experience on user-generated content or marketplace platforms where content quality, trust, and scale intersect.

Founding-manager experience in standing up a new team and platform from a blank page.

Skills and Tools

Distributed systems

Data pipelines and streaming architectures

LLM-based document processing

Vision-language parsing

RAG and retrieval infrastructure

Vector search and embedding pipelines

Salary and Benefits

In the state of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $187,500 and $281,500.

In the United States outside of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $154,500 and $267,500.

In Canada, the reasonably expected salary range is between $198,000 CAD and $252,500 CAD.

Scribd Flex empowers employees to choose workstyles and locations while committing to intentional in-person moments.

About the Company

Scribd, Inc. is on a mission to advance human understanding through four products: Scribd, Slideshare, Everand, and Fable. The company supports a culture of flexibility, employee empowerment, and GRIT, which stands for goals, results, innovative ideas, and team collaboration.

How to Apply

Apply on the official company careers page.

Skills and tech stack

LLM RAG Vector Search Vision-Language Models LLMs Distributed Systems

Questions candidates ask

Where is the Senior Engineering Manager, Backend position located?

The role is based in San Francisco, with occasional in-person attendance required regardless of location through Scribd Flex.

What experience is required for this role?

Candidates must have 8 or more years of experience in software engineering, including at least 3 years leading backend, data-infrastructure, or platform engineering teams.

What is the salary range for candidates in California?

The reasonably expected salary range in California is between $187,500 and $281,500.

What does the Content Foundations team do?

The Content Foundations team owns the ingestion system where hundreds of millions of documents and presentations are uploaded, understood, transformed, and served to customers and AI agents.

What kind of hybrid work model does the company use?

Scribd Flex allows employees to choose their workstyle and location while requiring occasional in-person attendance to strengthen collaboration and culture.

Ready to apply?

The application is on the official ScribdInc careers page.

Apply on company site