--- title: 'Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Premium Discovery at Scribd, Inc.' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-machine-learning-engineer-premium-discovery-scribd-inc-san-francisco-atn85h7kpjt3' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-24' --- # Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Premium Discovery at Scribd, Inc. - **Company:** Scribd, Inc. - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-10-22 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-24 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/scribdinc/be52ca1d-f715-4870-8629-ad0a41aa3c38 ## 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 Premium is the Scribd Inc. pillar behind two reading products: Everand, the audiobook and ebook subscription app, and Fable, the social app where readers track, discuss and discover books. Helping readers find their next book is central to both, so search and recommendations sit at the heart of the products. You'll join Premium's new Discovery squad. It's a small, dedicated group of recommendations, search, applied research and ML engineers working full time on discovery for Everand and Fable. The squad works closely with Orion, Scribd's ML platform team. Orion runs the feature store, model registry, embedding-based retrieval and model serving behind discovery across Scribd, Slideshare and Everand. ## Role overview We're looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to own recommendations for Fable and grow into the technical lead for Premium recommendations. Fable's recommender today is a collaborative-filtering model built in house. It has served readers well, but it has no real-time signals and no learned ranking, and it can't recommend to new or lapsed readers. Your first big project is to move Fable onto Orion, so Fable and Everand share a modern recommendation stack. ## Key responsibilities - Lead the migration of Fable's recommendations onto Orion, covering data, features, training, serving and experiments, while keeping today's recommendations running. - Extend Orion's rankers, feature store and embedding-based retrieval to support Fable, in partnership with the Orion ML platform team. - Own the health of Fable's recommendation systems in production: quality, latency, cost and on-call. - Bring Fable's social signals (shelves, ratings, reviews, book clubs, reader similarity) into recommendations for both Fable and Everand. - Design and analyze A/B tests with product managers and analysts to decide what ships. - Act as technical lead for Premium recommendations. Shape the roadmap with product managers, and see work that depends on other teams' systems through to delivery. - Raise the bar on engineering practice in the squad through design reviews, code quality and operational readiness. Tech you'll work with You'll work across two stacks: Fable's on Google Cloud and Orion's on AWS. - Fable: Python (FastAPI, Django), PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Kubernetes, Google Cloud including Vertex AI - Orion and Everand: Python, Go and gRPC, Ruby on Rails, Databricks and Spark, Airflow, AWS SageMaker, Weaviate for embedding-based retrieval, feature store and model registry - Infrastructure: AWS (EKS, ECS, Lambda, SQS, ElastiCache), Datadog, Terraform ## Requirements Must have - 5+ years as a professional ML or software engineer, with a track record of shipping production ML systems. - Hands-on experience building and running recommender systems in production, such as collaborative filtering or matrix factorization, two-tower or embedding retrieval, and learned ranking. - Experience with large-scale data processing (Spark, Databricks, BigQuery or similar). - Experience on at least one major cloud (AWS or GCP), including deploying services on containers (Kubernetes, ECS or similar). - Experience designing and analyzing online experiments. - A record of leading projects that depend on other teams, and of working directly with product managers. - Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent professional experience. ## Nice to have - Google Cloud experience, especially Vertex AI and BigQuery. - Experience migrating or replacing a production ML system while keeping it running. - Social or graph-based recommendations, such as user similarity, follows or groups. - Search and semantic retrieval (Elasticsearch, Vertex AI Search, vector databases). - Experience on consumer apps for reading, media or social. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- At Scribd, Inc. your base pay is one part of your total compensation package and is determined within a range. Our pay ranges are based on the local cost of labor benchmarks for each specific role, level, and geographic location. San Francisco is our highest geographic market in the United States. In the state of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $170,000 [minimum salary in our lowest geographic market within California] to $265,000 [maximum salary in our highest geographic market within California]. In the United States, outside of California, the reasonably expected salary range is between $140,000 [minimum salary in our lowest US geographic market outside of California] to $252,000 [maximum salary in our highest US geographic market outside of California]. In Canada, the reasonably expected salary range is between 179,000 CAD[minimum salary in our lowest geographic market] to 237,500 CAD[maximum salary in our highest geographic market]. We carefully consider a wide range of factors when determining compensation, including but not limited to experience; job-related skill sets; relevant education or training; and other business and organizational needs. The salary range listed is for the level at which this job has been scoped. In the event that you are considered for a different level, a higher or lower pay range would apply. This position is also eligible for a competitive equity ownership, and a comprehensive and generous benefits package. Working at Scribd, Inc. Are you currently based in a location where Scribd, Inc. can employ you? 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 at Scribd, Inc. - Scribd 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 Scribd, Inc. suite of products - Enterprise access to leading AI tools Get to Know Scribd, Inc. [About Scribd, Inc.](https://www.scribdinc.com/about) [Life at Scribd, Inc.](https://bit.ly/ScribdonLinkedin) 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 accommodations@scribd.com about the need for adjustments at any point in the interview process. If you apply for a job with Scribd, Inc. or otherwise engage with us in connection with employment (including as an employee, contractor, or other personnel), the personal information we process in that context is subject to our Employee and Applicant Privacy Policy, which is available [here](https://support.scribd.com/hc/en-us/articles/49754646187284-Employee-and-Applicant-Privacy-Policy-and-Notice-at-Collection). Scribd, Inc. 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. ## About Scribd, Inc. ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Scribd, Inc. is an AI-powered knowledge company on a mission to advance human understanding through a family of content platforms. - **Entity Type**: Private (backed by investors including Redpoint Ventures, Spectrum Equity, LGT Capital Partners, and Tencent) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, United States - **Founded**: 2007 - **Founders**: Not publicly available in provided sources ## Core Business - Primary industry/industries: Digital content subscription, knowledge management, social reading, professional presentations - Target customers: B2C (readers, audiobook listeners), B2B/professionals (researchers, academics, business professionals through Scribd and SlideShare), and community-driven readers (Fable) - Mission statement: “Advance human understanding” by moving users from information access to real understanding and application ## Products & Services - **[Scribd](https://www.scribdinc.com/)**: Applied knowledge platform with 300M+ community-uploaded documents, research papers, legal filings, academic materials, and manuals. (Subscription $11.99/mo.) - **[SlideShare](https://www.scribdinc.com/)**: Collection of 25 million presentations uploaded by subject matter experts, used by professionals and academics for inspiration and expertise sharing. (Included with Scribd subscription.) - **[Everand](https://www.scribdinc.com/)**: Digital content subscription home to millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and podcasts, including bestselling and iconic titles. Tiered plans starting at $11.99/mo. - **[Fable](https://www.scribdinc.com/)**: Leading social reading platform where readers discover, discuss, and share books through curated book clubs and personalized experiences. Free + Fable Plus paid options. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company) - **Key Metric**: 2M+ paying subscribers; 400M+ pieces of content; 250M+ monthly visitors; content in over 50 languages; 30M+ hours read per month (from scribdinc.com) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Redpoint Ventures, Spectrum Equity, LGT Capital Partners, Tencent (as stated on about page); partnerships with top publishing houses - **Growth Signals**: Deliberate unbundling of products in 2023; acquisition of Fable in 2025 (adding social reading); expansion to team locations across US, Canada, UK, Mexico & Netherlands; 300+ employees; AI-powered product enhancements ## Competitive Advantages - Massive, diverse content library spanning documents, presentations, ebooks, audiobooks, and social reading – all under one parent entity - AI integration to improve content discovery and understanding, described as “applied knowledge” - Strong brand recognition with Scribd, SlideShare, Everand, and now Fable reaching distinct but overlapping audiences - Backed by top-tier investors with long-term support ## Strategic Focus - Continue product unbundling to better serve distinct user needs (research vs. leisure reading vs. professional learning) - Expand AI capabilities to close the gap between information access and real understanding - Grow subscription revenue across multiple platforms (Scribd, SlideShare, Everand, Fable) - Deepen community engagement through social reading (Fable) ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Values include “Prioritize the Customer,” “Act Like an Owner,” “Be Bold,” “Debate & Commit,” “Embrace Plot Twists,” and “Take Action.” Emphasis on transparency, trust, and cross-functional collaboration (Pillar Model, Lead With Care philosophy). - **Work Style**: Scribd Flex – choose workstyle and location that enables best performance; built on trust and outcomes with intentional in-person connection. - **Benefits** (from careers page): - Fully paid premiums for employee medical, dental, vision; funded mental health support. - Wellness stipend (annual) for wellbeing, workspace, personal comfort. - Generous PTO including vacation, personal days, flexible sick time, winter break, volunteer time, milestone sabbaticals. - Fully paid parental leave plus fertility/reproductive health benefits. - Retirement matching and equity for every employee from day one. - Fully paid access to best-in-class AI tools and complimentary subscriptions to all products (Everand, Scribd, SlideShare, Fable). - Ongoing investment in learning: education support, certifications, conferences, coaching. - **Engineering Culture**: Product-focused, with AI and content as core; employees are equipped with “tools and knowledge to move faster and think bigger.” ## Sources 1. [scribdinc.com/about](https://www.scribdinc.com/about) 2. [scribdinc.com/careers](https://www.scribdinc.com/careers) 3. [scribdinc.com/newsroom/what-is-scribd-inc](https://www.scribdinc.com/newsroom/what-is-scribd-inc) 4. 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