Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Fable Core
Los Angeles, California, United StatesAll locationsLos Angeles, California, United StatesSan Francisco, California, United StatesOttawa, Ontario, CanadaPhoenix, Arizona, United StatesToronto, Ontario, CanadaDenver, Colorado, United StatesSalt Lake City, Utah, United StatesAtlanta, Georgia, United StatesChicago, Illinois, United StatesHouston, Texas, United StatesPortland, Oregon, United StatesNew York City, New York, United StatesVancouver, British Columbia, CanadaSan Diego, California, United StatesSacramento, California, United StatesJacksonville, Florida, United StatesSeattle, Washington, United StatesMexico City, MexicoAustin, Texas, United States Remote
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About the role
Fable Core is the backend, infrastructure, and platform team behind Fable – a social reading product now part of Scribd, Inc. Fable is a leading platform for everything related to books and reading: find your next book, join a book club, build a reading habit. We care deeply about building a great experience for our growing community of 1M+ monthly active users. The Fable app has often been featured in the App Store, both as App Of The Day and the Essential Book Apps list. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Fable Core team, you will set technical direction for the Fable backend and own the reliability and health of the platform that powers the product. You will partner with product, design, ML, and infrastructure partners to turn ambiguous product intent into durable backend systems, lead incident response end-to-end, and raise the ceiling for the team through design leadership and mentorship. We are a small team with broad scope - every position on the team is high-impact. Our stack: Python/Django, Postgres, Kubernetes, Datadog, GCP / AWS.
What you'll bring
- 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.
- 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.