The Principal Engineer will lead technical direction and execution for identity and engagement platforms, modernize systems, and mentor engineers, driving high-quality delivery and collaboration across teams.
Role Description
Dropbox is hiring a Principal Software Engineer, Identity & Engagement to define and build the next-generation identity platform powering Dropbox’s product ecosystem.
This platform sits at the center of every Dropbox experience, from user onboarding and collaboration to enterprise integrations and AI-powered workflows. As Dropbox evolves into an AI-native SaaS platform, identity is no longer just about users logging in. It is about securely enabling people, applications, and AI agents to act, collaborate, and automate work on their behalf.
In this role, you will set the technical vision and lead the architectural evolution of Dropbox’s identity systems, spanning authentication, authorization, account lifecycle, and delegated access. You will partner across Product, Security, Infrastructure, and AI teams to build systems that are secure, scalable, and intuitive, while enabling new classes of intelligent, agent-driven experiences.
This is a high-impact, company-level role shaping how trust, access, and control are modeled across Dropbox.
Responsibilities- Technical leadership and architecture: Define and drive the technical roadmap for identity and engagement platform services, including APIs, service boundaries, data models, and reliability goals.
- Modernization and platform evolution: Lead multi-quarter modernization efforts (e.g., reducing legacy dependencies, improving scalability, simplifying integrations) with a focus on cohesion, observability, and operational excellence.
- Identity and access systems: Design and improve authentication, authorization, account integrity, and identity lifecycle services with strong security and privacy posture.
- Engagement and insights foundations: Build and evolve the systems that power engagement signals, experimentation hooks, telemetry/analytics pipelines, and usage insights to support product iteration and growth.
- Developer velocity and platform enablement: Create reusable platform primitives, reference architectures, and best practices that make it easier for product teams to build safely and quickly.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with Product, Design, Security, Infrastructure, and AI/ML teams to align technical decisions with customer outcomes and organizational priorities.
- Execution and quality: Own delivery of complex initiatives end-to-end—breaking down ambiguous problems, driving alignment, and ensuring high-quality implementation, testing, rollout, and oncall readiness.
- Mentorship and influence: Mentor senior engineers, review critical designs, elevate engineering standards, and influence technical direction across teams beyond your immediate scope.
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and operating large-scale backend or platform systems.
- Proven ability to lead architecture for distributed systems with high reliability, performance, and security requirements.
- Strong expertise in at least two of the following areas: identity/authn/authz, service API design, analytics/telemetry infrastructure, search/retrieval foundations, experimentation platforms, or engagement systems.
- Track record of driving modernization efforts in complex environments (e.g., migrating legacy systems, improving data quality and observability, simplifying architecture).
- Excellent technical judgment and ability to balance speed, stability, and long-term maintainability.
- Strong communication skills: able to write clear design docs, align stakeholders, and lead technical decision-making across teams.
- Experience with cloud-scale identity platforms (SSO, session management, risk signals, account security, privacy controls).
- Familiarity with AI enablement infrastructure, especially data pipelines, engagement signals, retrieval/search systems, and feedback loops.
- Experience building or operating multi-tenant SaaS platforms with strong compliance and security requirements.
- Demonstrated ability to influence org-wide standards and technical strategy (beyond a single team), including mentorship of other tech leads and principals.
US Zone 1
$284,800—$385,200 USD
US Zone 2
$256,300—$346,700 USD
US Zone 3
$227,800—$308,200 USD
US Zone 1
This role is not available in Zone 1
US Zone 2
$256,300—$346,700 USD
US Zone 3
$227,800—$308,200 USD
Dropbox San Francisco, California, USA Office
Though remote is our primary way of working, meaningful in-person connection and collaboration is a critical part of Virtual First. Our San Francisco Studio is a place for teams to come together to host meetings, off-sites, and build community.
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