Scribd - Senior SWE (Identity)

About the team and role

Our team's mission at Scribd is to grow revenue and reduce costs through sophisticated, reliable, and secure authentication solutions. The Identity full-stack team works on projects that span Product, Infrastructure, Security, and Customer Support, and supports frontend and mobile teams via APIs. We have 200 million monthly visitors with more than 2 million active subscribers, and we receive several million login and sign-up requests a day. The team builds and maintains secure protocols that protect user credentials and data during authentication, while giving users a frictionless, seamless login and sign-up experience — and keeping our authentication methods compliant with relevant security standards, regulations, and industry best practices.

Scope of this role: This position begins on Customer Support / self-service initiatives (e.g., self-service account recovery and cancellation, reducing support load) and then transitions to core Identity roadmap projects (authentication, login & account-creation improvements, session management).

How we work with AI

AI-powered development tools like Claude Code and Cursor are deeply integrated into our day-to-day engineering culture. We leverage these technologies for authoring code, troubleshooting complex bugs, and vetting architectural designs, and we look for engineers who do the same. However, accountability remains paramount: you are expected to fully own every line of code you deliver and must be able to articulate and justify your technical decisions. To evaluate this, our hiring process features a specific AI Fluency assessment where you will collaborate with an AI assistant in a live environment.

About you

You're a determined, detail-oriented engineer who enjoys working with a team. You are confident yet humble about your skills and your ability to be a productive developer. You care about code review as both a chance to present your work and to learn from others. You own your work — you can explain and defend your designs and code without being prompted. You focus on long-term solutions, not just the quick fix, and you never skip testing. You are always learning and always working to improve your craft.

What you will do

• Build self-service flows that reduce Customer Support load (e.g., account recovery, cancellation) and reduce friction across support tools & workflows (Zendesk, Forethought, Scribd Admin panels).

• Build and enhance identity-related functionality: authentication, session management, and user data protection.

• Improve login and account creation (e.g., passwordless / magic links / passkeys, One Tap), MFA, and identity verification.

• Integrate and optimize risk-based fraud detection and other security measures to mitigate threats.

• Design and implement user data retention and deletion workflows in compliance with regulations (e.g., GDPR).

• Implement projects with attention to quality, maintainability, performance, scale, and observability.

• Write clear technical documentation based on project proposals.

• Work closely with product, security, and legal teams on identity initiatives.

Requirements (must have)

• 4–6 years of professional software development experience.

• Strong written communication skills (we are a remote-first company).

• Proficiency in Ruby on Rails; experience with JavaScript/React (≈1 year is sufficient — this is a backend-focused role with some frontend).

• API integration skills, with a focus on authentication.

• Experience working with relational databases at scale, and proficient with SQL.

• Experience with complex backend systems, including MFA, email verification, and risk-based fraud detection.

• Familiarity with version control (Git).

• Enthusiasm — teammates who are ready to build and improve the way we build.

• Participate in the Identity squad on-call program. The 24/7 on-call rotation is shared among engineers and occurs every three weeks, with one week of on-call duty per engineer. Historically on-call is uneventful — about one page a month.

• Good overlap with the EST timezone (09:00–13:00 EST).

• AI Fluency: Comfortable using AI tools to accelerate development — and able to explain, defend, and own everything you produce with AI assistance.

Nice to have

• Security fundamentals — best practices for handling sensitive user data and transactions.

• Experience with Customer Support tools such as Zendesk and Forethought.

• Familiarity with CIAM, SSO, SAML, MFA, and federation concepts.

Interview process

• Silver Recruiter Screen

• Silver Technical Screen

• Client Technical Interview

• Client Database Modeling Interview

• Client AI adoption Interview

• Client Final Interview