Staff Infrastructure Engineer

**About The Company**:
At Scribd (pronounced “scribbed”), our mission is to spark human curiosity. Join our team as we create a world of stories and knowledge, democratize the exchange of ideas and information, and empower collective expertise through our three products: Everand, Scribd, and Slideshare.

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.

When it comes to workplace structure, we believe in balancing individual flexibility and community connections. It’s through our flexible work benefit, Scribd Flex, that employees - in partnership with their manager - can choose the daily work-style that best suits their individual needs. A key tenet of Scribd Flex is our prioritization of intentional in-person moments to build collaboration, culture, and connection. For this reason, occasional in-person attendance is required for all Scribd employees, regardless of their location.

So what are we looking for in new team members? Well, we hire for “GRIT”. The textbook definition of GRIT is demonstrating the intersection of passion and perseverance towards long term goals. At Scribd, we are inspired by the potential that this can unlock, and ask each of our employees to pursue a GRIT-ty approach to their work. In a tactical sense, GRIT is also a handy acronym that outlines the standards we hold ourselves and each other to. Here’s what that means for you: we’re looking for someone who showcases the ability to set and achieve **G**oals, achieve **R**esults within their job responsibilities, contribute **I**nnovative ideas and solutions, and positively influence the broader **T**eam through collaboration and attitude.

**About The Team**

Core Infrastructure designs, operates, and evolves Scribd’s AWS platform. We build the paved roads—infrastructure orchestration, networking, observability, caching, relational databases, and data platforms—so product teams can move fast with confidence.

Scribd is seeking an Infrastructure Engineer to join the Core Infrastructure team and build the foundations that take Scribd into the future. Each day offers opportunities to deliver and to learn.

We value inclusion and diverse perspectives. We review infrastructure changes in code, define SLOs, and run blameless postmortems; we build paved roads with guardrails for speed and reliability. If you don’t meet every single requirement but are excited about the role, we encourage you to apply.

**About the Role**

You will architect and operate a modern, service‑oriented AWS environment and partner with service owners as we deepen our AWS‑centric model. Your work will improve reliability, performance, and observability for a suite of products used by 250+ million people each month.
- Design, build, and operate core platform components (ECS/EKS, networking, load balancing, logging, metrics, tracing, caching, and storage)
- Provide architectural guidance, operational support, and capacity planning for Amazon Aurora (MySQL‑ and PostgreSQL‑compatible) clusters
- Define SLOs and actionable alerting; reduce MTTR and alert noise through automation and better signals
- Ship infrastructure as code (Terraform) with reviewed modules, tests, and CI/CD
- Run migrations and modernizations (e.g., containerization, service patterns, data platform upgrades) with clear runbooks and rollout plans
- Partner with product teams to shift operational ownership; coach teams on runbooks, dashboards, and reliability best practices
- Improve cost efficiency, performance, and security by design (least‑privilege IAM, secret management, and network boundaries)
- Participate in an on‑call rotation and lead blameless postmortems that drive lasting fixes
- Contribute to a paved‑road developer experience: documentation, templates, and office hours

**Required Skills**:

- Data platforms: designing and operating SQL databases (e.g., Amazon Aurora), NoSQL/search (e.g., Elasticsearch/OpenSearch), and key‑value caches (e.g., Redis/ElastiCache)
- Database performance tuning and cluster scaling experience
- Proficiency with containers and schedulers (Docker with ECS and/or Kubernetes)
- Hands‑on Terraform and Git‑based workflows, including tests for infrastructure changes
- Observability: metrics/logs/traces, SLO‑based alerting, and incident response fundamentals
- Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, routing, load balancing (L4/L7)
- Ability to write clean, maintainable code for automation, monitoring, and tooling in at least one language such as Python, Ruby, Rust, or Go
- Clear communicator and mentor; comfortable leading deep technical design discussions across teams and mentoring junior engineers

**Desired Skills**
- Working knowledge of ProxySQL, query processing, and routing
- Experience with Delta Lake and S3 (data lake patterns, partitioning, lifecycle policies)
- Experience improving 24/7 on‑call health: reducing