Staff Backend Engineer (Payments and Billing)
*Scribd · San Francisco
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
The Payments & Billing team at Scribd powers our subscription revenue engine by delivering the systems that manage billing lifecycles, global payment processing, and financial reliability across Scribd, Everand, Slideshare, and Fable. Our focus areas include payment processing at scale, invoicing, reconciliation, fraud prevention, compliance, and support for international currencies and payment methods. We partner closely with Product, Finance, Risk, and Platform Engineering to ensure that millions of readers worldwide can reliably access our services every day.
We're an agentic engineering team. AI agents (Claude Code, shared agent skills, and integrations with tools like Datadog, Sentry, and Stripe) are part of how we design, build, test, triage, and operate every day. Because our systems move money and sit in PCI scope, we hold AI-generated work to the same human-review, correctness, and security bar as anything else we ship.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Lead the technical architecture and implementation of Scribd's payments and billing systems, the backbone of our subscription business.
- Design, build, and operate backend services that power subscription payments at global scale.
- Own billing lifecycle, global payments, invoicing, reconciliation, and financial reliability, integrating with multiple providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree) and supporting international currencies and local methods.
- Ensure compliance and security of financial systems through PCI DSS, tokenization, encryption, and secure data handling.
- Lead agentic engineering on the team: use AI agents across design, implementation, testing, debugging, and operations, and help the team adopt workflows that make us measurably faster without lowering the bar on correctness or security.
- Build shared AI leverage for payments, such as agent skills for alert triage, incident investigation, and anomaly detection, and runbooks, documentation, and context that agents can use reliably. Contribute these to Scribd's shared skills marketplace rather than building one-off tools.
- Define guardrails for AI-assisted changes in PCI scope: human review of every change, keeping cardholder and sensitive data out of prompts, logs, and unapproved tools, and clear testing and verification standards for AI-generated code that touches money movement.
- Foster a culture of technical excellence while driving scalable, resilient, and observable financial systems that enable teams to move fast, simplify complexity, and deliver revenue with confidence.
- Modernize legacy systems and eliminate technical debt to improve velocity and scalability, using AI agents to accelerate migrations, refactors, and test coverage where they make sense.
- Partner with Product, Finance, Risk, Platform, and Analytics to deliver secure, reliable financial flows, leveraging data, metrics, and telemetry to uncover trends, resolve anomalies, and guide the team with clarity and foresight.
- Mentor engineers, shape cross-team technical strategy, and tackle some of the hardest scaling and security challenges in the company, including raising the bar on how the team designs, reviews, and verifies AI-assisted work.
WE'RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO
- Has 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with deep expertise in building and scaling distributed systems for financial or mission-critical workloads.
- Brings a strong foundation in data modeling, transactional consistency, and high-throughput architectures, with hands-on SQL (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL) and familiarity with NoSQL and caching.
- Is skilled in observability and reliability practices: defining SLOs, implementing metrics/alerts, debugging distributed systems, and leading incident response.
- Has strong coding ability in at least one modern backend language such as Ruby (preferred), Java, Go, or Python, with a focus on clean, maintainable, and secure code.
- Has hands-on experience with agentic engineering tools and workflows in a real production setting. You use AI agents daily, can explain how you choose a tool or approach for a task, and know where these tools break down.
- Has the judgment to rigorously validate AI-generated code, protect sensitive data, and recognize when a change needs deeper investigation or shouldn't be delegated to an agent at all. You can explain and own every line you ship, whoever or whatever wrote it.
- Has a proven track record of technical leadership: setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and driving large-scale migrations or modernization efforts.
- Has multiplied a team's effectiveness by establishing patterns, tooling, or review practices that others adopted, including for AI-assisted development.
- Communicates clearly and collaborates across product, finance, risk, and platform teams, influencing both technical and business decisions.
- Contributes to cross-team initiatives (mentoring, architecture review groups, knowledge sharing) that shape Scribd's engineering culture.
IT'S A PLUS IF YOU
- Have strong coding ability in Ruby.
- Have deep experience designing and operating payment or billing systems.
- Have integrated with major payment service providers (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, PayPal) and managed multi-currency or local payment methods.
- Bring knowledge of compliance and security standards (PCI DSS, encryption, tokenization).
- Understand fraud prevention strategies (chargebacks, retries, card fingerprinting, abuse detection).
- Have led large-scale migrations between payment providers or billing systems with minimal customer impact.
- Have built agent skills, MCP integrations, or AI-assisted on-call and incident workflows that other engineers adopted.
- Have designed human-in-the-loop or AI code-review and merge controls in a regulated or PCI-scoped environment.
- Understand AI-specific security risks, such as prompt injection, secrets or PII leaking through agent context or logs, and over-permissioned agent credentials.
WORKING AT SCRIBD, INC.
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:
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