Backend Engineer

We’re looking for a Senior Ruby Engineer to join our client, a prominent American digital library and subscription-based content platform with a global audience and a large-scale catalog of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, documents, and other digital content.

As a Senior Ruby Engineer, you will play a key role in designing, building, and scaling the core systems that control how content enters, transforms, and moves across the platform. You will work on ingestion pipelines, metadata services, content processing workflows, and distributed systems that power search, recommendations, AI/ML use cases, and the end-user reading and listening experience.

This remote position is ideal for a senior backend engineer with strong Ruby expertise, solid Python experience, and a background in distributed systems, ETL workflows, document/content processing, and database design.

Must-have for the position

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience;
• Strong experience with Ruby;
• Hands-on experience with Python and/or Go;
• Experience building distributed workflows in AWS-based environments;
• Experience with ingestion pipelines, ETL, or document/content processing systems;
• Strong database design skills;
• Experience with SQL and/or NoSQL databases;
• Experience with AWS services, including AWS Step Functions;
• Strong system design skills and production engineering mindset;
• English level: Upper-Intermediate or higher.

Will be a strong plus

• Experience with document formats such as PDF, ebooks, and markdown;
• Understanding of document internals, OCR, parsing, and transformation workflows;
• Familiarity with ML/AI systems, including embeddings, chunking, and retrieval pipelines;
• Experience with spam detection, content security, or trust & safety systems;
• Experience with AWS Lambda, SQS/SNS, S3, and distributed async processing;
• Experience improving observability for asynchronous pipelines;
• Experience using AI coding agents and advanced developer tools.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive technical initiatives across core content systems;
• Lead the design, implementation, and scaling of ingestion pipelines, metadata services, and content processing workflows;
• Build reliable systems that handle diverse file formats, edge cases, and high-volume content flows;
• Ensure high availability, data integrity, and operational excellence across distributed systems;
• Collaborate with Content Security, ML Data Engineering, Search & Discovery, Product, and Content Library teams;
• Improve metadata extraction, classification, enrichment, and content quality workflows;
• Help power personalization, search, recommendations, and AI/ML use cases through better content processing systems;
• Identify architectural opportunities and propose new platform capabilities;
• Refactor legacy systems while maintaining production stability;
• Provide technical guidance across teams and raise the bar for system design, data modeling, and production quality;
• Help shape the use of AI and LLM-based systems in content processing;
• Support the team’s adoption of AI coding agents and modern engineering tools.

About the project

The project focuses on building and evolving the systems that control how content is ingested, transformed, validated, enriched, and delivered across a large digital content platform.

These systems support a hybrid catalog that includes premium publisher content and user-generated uploads across many formats. The work directly affects downstream systems such as search, recommendations, AI/ML pipelines, content quality, personalization, and the user reading/listening experience.

The team is evolving the architecture iteratively: improving legacy systems, strengthening async data observability, hardening content processing workflows, and integrating AI/LLM-based tooling into both product systems and engineering workflows.

Areas you can work on

• Content ingestion pipelines and ETL workflows;
• Metadata extraction, enrichment, and classification;
• Spam detection and early-stage content quality validation;
• OCR and content extraction for ML/LLM use cases;
• Security hardening of content processing systems;
• Data observability for async and distributed pipelines;
• Workflow orchestration with AWS Step Functions;
• Platform architecture improvements for content scale and reliability.

Tech stack

Ruby, Python, Go, SQL/NoSQL databases, AWS, AWS Lambda, SQS/SNS, S3, AWS Step Functions, Microservices.

Team composition

You will report to a Senior Engineering Manager and join the Content Foundations team — a small, growing engineering squad with significant ownership over content platform architecture.

There are currently 17 KITRUM engineers working across different squads at the client side, so collaboration and knowledge sharing with nearby teams is likely. No KITRUM engineers are currently embedded in this specific team.

Working conditions

— Work schedule: partial coverage of EST working hours
— Fully Remote
— Engagement: Long-term, full-time
— 2-week sprints with kickoff on Monday evenings and demos on Friday evenings

Interview process

• HR Interview: Initial discussion with recruiter
• KITRUM’s Technical Interview
• Client Interviews

Why you’ll love working here

• Competitive Pay: We offer compensation that reflects your skills and experience
• Remote Flexibility: Work fully remotely with an international team
• Professional Growth: Opportunity to work on large-scale distributed systems, metadata enrichment, and AI-adjacent engineering challenges
• Supportive Team: You’ll join an experienced engineering environment and have an onboarding buddy to help you ramp up
• Long-term Opportunity: Ongoing development project with room for ownership and impact
  
  

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