Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby on Rails/Python) - Content Foundations

About the Team & Role The Content Foundations team builds the systems that power how content enters, evolves, and is delivered across the company. This includes ingestion, metadata extraction, early quality controls, and the core artifacts that power search, recommendations, AI/ML systems, and the reading and listening experience.
Why this role is interesting
Content quality and early‑stage validation
Spam detection at upload time
OCR and content extraction for ML/LLM use cases
Evolving content formats to support downstream AI workflows
Security hardening in partnership with Content and Infra‑Security
Architectural improvements to how content and metadata flow across systems, including improving data observability for complex, asynchronous pipelines
What You’ll Do
Own and drive technical initiatives:
Lead the design, implementation, and scaling of core content systems, including ingestion pipelines, metadata services, and content processing workflows.
Build scalable, reliable systems:
Design robust solutions that handle diverse file formats and edge cases while maintaining high availability and strong data integrity.
Collaborate across teams:
Partner with Content Security, ML Data Engineering, Search & Discovery, the Content Library squad, and Product to build systems that balance performance, scalability, and user experience.
Improve content quality and discoverability:
Work with ML and Discovery teams to improve metadata extraction, classification, and enrichment that power personalization and search.
Drive platform evolution:
Identify architectural opportunities, propose new capabilities, and help evolve the company’s content platform to meet growing scale and complexity.
Mentor and lead:
Provide technical guidance across teams and help raise the bar on system design, data modeling, and production excellence.
Champion AI‑driven engineering:
Help shape how we leverage AI and LLM‑based systems within content processing, while maintaining a high bar for quality and reliability. In addition to building AI into our pipeline, you will help lead the team’s adoption of AI coding agents and advanced developer tools to accelerate how we build and scale our systems.
Who You Are
7+ years of software engineering experience, including experience navigating the trade‑offs of refactoring legacy systems while maintaining high availability.
Experience building and scaling ingestion pipelines, ETL workflows, or document/content processing systems.
Comfortable working with messy data and building systems resilient to real‑world inputs.
Proficient in Ruby, Python, or Go (our stack includes all three).
Experience with AWS (Lambda, SQS/SNS, S3, Step Functions) and distributed workflows.
Strong database design skills (SQL and/or NoSQL), with a focus on reliability and resilience.
Able to communicate technical complexity to non‑technical stakeholders and have a track record of building consensus across cross‑functional engineering teams.
Enjoy mentoring others and working collaboratively across teams.
Nice‑to‑Have
Experience with document formats (PDF, ebooks, markdown) and internals (OCR, parsing, transformation).
Familiarity with ML/AI systems (embeddings, chunking, retrieval pipelines).
Background in spam or content security systems.
If you enjoy working on complex, high‑scale systems where solving foundational problems unlocks value across an entire ecosystem, we’d love to hear from you.
Compensation In the United States, our base pay is determined within a range based on local cost of labor benchmarks. For California, the reasonably expected salary range is $146,500 to $228,000. Outside California, the range is $120,000 to $217,000. In Canada, the range is 153,000 CAD to 202,000 CAD. The posted range is for the level at which this job has been scoped. This position is also eligible for competitive equity ownership and a comprehensive benefits package.
Working at the company Employees must have their primary residence in or near one of the following cities. This includes surrounding metro areas or locations within a typical commuting distance:
United States: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Houston, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C.
Canada: Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver
Mexico: Mexico City
Benefits
the company Flex (flexible work model)
Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
Mental health support and disability coverage
Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick time, holidays, winter break, volunteer time, and sabbaticals
Paid parental leave and family support benefits
Retirement matching and employee equity
Learning and development programs and professional growth opportunities
Wellness and home office stipends
Complimentary access to the the company suite of products
Enterprise access to leading AI tools
We want our interview process to be accessible to everyone. You can inform us of any reasonable adjustments we can make to better accommodate your needs by emailing about the need for adjustments at any point in the interview process.
the company is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We encourage people of all backgrounds to apply, and believe that a diversity of perspectives and experiences create a foundation for the best ideas. Come join us in building something meaningful.
#J-18808-Ljbffr