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
