As an Staff Software Engineer on the Smart Storage Management team, you’ll define and drive the multi-year strategy that gives admins and users clear storage visibility and control while improving Dropbox’s storage efficiency and cost posture. You will lead architecture and execution across admin console and user-facing surfaces for restoration, cleanup, and reclamation workflows, partnering across teams to deliver cohesive experiences and high-reliability systems. This role is leadership/architecture-weighted (not code-heavy) and offers substantial senior-leadership exposure.
Our Engineering Career Framework is viewable by anyone outside the company and describes what’s expected for our engineers at each of our career levels. Check out our blog post on this topic and more here.
- Define and deliver the multi-team storage strategy across with measurable outcomes.
- Lead architecture for with strong safeguards and observability.
- Make high-judgment trade-offs across customer experience, compliance, cost, and operational risk; drive org-wide alignment.
- Raise reliability/quality bars (SLO/SLI ownership, validation frameworks, backfill/idempotency, rollout/rollback).
- Mentor senior engineers; model high-signal design reviews and effective cross-team influence.
- Lead incident posture and prevention; own learning loops and durable fixes.
- Partner with PM/Design to set, instrument, and communicate goals.
On-call work may be necessary occasionally to help address bugs, outages, or other operational issues, with the goal of maintaining a stable and high-quality experience for our customers.
Requirements- 10+ years building/operating distributed systems; 3+ years leading multi-team initiatives at Staff scope.
- BS degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Deep expertise in front-end (JavaScript, React, Angular, HTML/CSS) and back-end (Node.js, Python) development.
- Extensive experience with databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB.
- Expert system/architecture design (pipelines/queues, data modeling, idempotency, backfills, failure recovery, safeguards).
- Proven cross-org influence and decision-making optimized for the broader org.
- Operational excellence: own SLO/SLIs, lead incidents, prevent recurrence.
- High-altitude communication and stakeholder management; crisp narratives when needed.
- Models responsible AI tool use (validate edge cases/legacy systems).
- Led multi-quarter strategies with measurable cost or Customer Experience outcomes.
- Comfortable partnering with eng teams without being code-heavy.
- Data platform familiarity (e.g., large-scale validation, Spark/Databricks POCs).
Dropbox applies increased tax deductible costs to remuneration earned by certain qualifying employees (to the extent an employee will be involved in the creation of the software as an “author”) for the transfer of copyrights, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Personal Income Tax Act.
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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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