Principal Engineer ( AI + Dev Tooling) at Scribd in San Francisco, CA

Job description

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 Developer Tooling team empowers Scribd engineers across the entire software development lifecycle. We build and evolve the tools, frameworks, and platforms that power engineering workflows — from modernizing infrastructure and optimizing build and deployment processes to pioneering agentic engineering capabilities that let AI agents execute alongside our developers. Our work delivers broad, measurable impact by boosting productivity and elevating the developer experience company-wide. About the role This is a Principal Engineer role, and it comes with a clear mandate: define how Scribd builds software as AI changes the work. You'll own the technical vision for agentic engineering at Scribd: how hundreds of engineers work alongside coding agents to write, review, and ship code across our stack. The roadmap here isn't handed to you. You decide where we invest, set the direction, and carry it through to what engineers actually use every day. You'll work directly with the CTO and engineering leadership to make agentic engineering a lasting advantage for the company, and the standards you set will shape how every team works. About you You care about developer experience, and you get real satisfaction from taking friction out of how engineers work. You think in platforms and systems, and you know when to protect stability and when to move fast. You've used coding agents seriously enough to have strong opinions about where they work, where they struggle, and what that means for how codebases and workflows need to change to get the most out of them. You're comfortable with a wide remit and a lot of ambiguity. Hand you a hard, loosely defined problem and the room to solve it, and that's a good day. What you will do • Decide the architecture, patterns, and guardrails that let engineers and coding agents work together across our codebase, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure, and set the direction for where it goes next. • Set the direction for Scribd's internal tools, libraries, and platforms, setting standards that engineers across the company rely on. • Partner with engineering leaders to turn ambiguous, cross-org problems into initiatives, and own them from framing through delivery. • Raise the bar across the org. Mentor staff and senior engineers, coach teams to get more out of agents in their day-to-day workflows, and roll out new capabilities throughout engineering. We're looking for • 10+ years in software engineering, including time operating at the Staff or Principal level • Hands-on experience applying AI to rea