Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Fable Core

Scribd, Inc. is on a mission to advance human understanding through its innovative products. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Fable Core team to set technical direction and ensure the reliability of the backend platform that supports their social reading product.

Responsibilities:

• Set technical direction for the Fable backend – write and socialize technical design documents, drive architecture reviews, and turn ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design
• Own backend reliability and platform health, including staging, CI/CD, databases, queues, cost, and observability
• Lead incident response and drive durable postmortems – write the doc, run the meeting, and make sure action items actually ship
• Be the Fable backend voice in cross-team planning and the glue in cross-functional execution
• Raise the ceiling for the team through PR review, mentorship, pairing, and by setting a high bar on design, testing, and ops
• Build and evolve the Fable backend platform so the team can ship faster and more safely
• Bring agentic engineering practices into the team’s day-to-day work and help the team adopt them effectively

Requirements:

• 10+ years of backend experience, including meaningful time in Python/Django and at least one other stack (Go, Node, Java/Kotlin, or similar)
• Experience operating production systems on a major cloud – OLTP databases at scale, container orchestration, queueing, and CI/CD
• A track record of owning incidents end-to-end, including the follow-through
• The ability to write a Technical Design Document (TDD) that a staff peer trusts and a product lead can understand, and to turn ambiguous product intent into concrete backend design
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills – you hold your own with senior PM, design, and ML partners, and you care more about the system landing than about being right
• A pragmatic default paired with a strong systems instinct – you look for root causes, not symptoms
• Hands-on experience with agentic engineering tools and workflows in a real production setting
• Experience with subscription and entitlements systems (Stripe, RevenueCat, App Store / Play billing)
• Experience leading a platform or infra function through a migration (on-prem→cloud, AWS↔GCP, monolith→services, or similar)
• Experience working alongside ML teams on recommendation or feed systems