Dropbox, we believe in simplifying the way people work together. We provide a range of innovative cloud-based solutions to empower individuals and businesses to share, access, and collaborate on their files seamlessly. Staff Engineers are pivotal in shaping our mission of building a more enlightened way of working where everyone can unleash their creative potential without constraints.
We need someone who can own big, ambiguous problems tied directly to company metrics, turn them into a clear six month technical roadmap, and lead technical delivery for a team of 15 to 20 engineers across boundaries. They collaborate on ideas that shape Area-level decisions, communicate clearly at any altitude, and continuously fold emerging business context into product and platform direction.
They bring strong engineering and operational excellence, setting and modeling high standards for reliability, scalability, execution rigor, and long-term maintainability across the systems they touch. They stay deeply hands-on, coding daily, writing design docs, reviewing critical changes, and defining architecture that becomes foundational for multiple teams. They influence Core Engineering roadmaps, set technical direction, and bring strong instincts for high-quality consumer-facing experiences.
They mentor senior talent, including IC4s and, in some cases, IC3s, raising the technical bar through direct coaching, feedback, and example. Their impact extends beyond their immediate team through broader org-level coaching and technical leadership.
Over time, they grow from a cross-team technical leader into an org-level technical strategist, optimizing for the company as a whole, not just their immediate scope.
This team will own project Optimize Activation and Engagement Flows for Team Users. Lead a multi-year plan to modernize onboarding and activation, clean up core Dropbox surfaces, and build intelligent, adaptive systems that boost team activation, invites, and long-term engagement across platforms. Opportunity for large impact on the business helping Teams users activate on the right features to drive down churn.
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.
Responsibilities- Lead the technical delivery of a team of 12 engineers to deliver high-impact business and customer outcomes.
- Shape technical direction and partner with Product Management as the DRI for critical company-wide objectives.
- Own massive, ambiguous technical and product problems that create company-wide opportunity.
- Be a prolific, hands-on coder who owns and implements the most critical, complex, and foundational components of the system.
- Influence roadmaps across orgs, breaking silos and steering decisions that change how Dropbox builds.
- Architect foundational systems that enable new product capabilities and operate reliably at the scale of hundreds of millions of users.
- Demonstrate senior technical leadership and maintain high engineering standards in a virtual-first environment.
Many teams at Dropbox run Services with on-call rotations, which entails being available for calls during both core and non-core business hours. If a team has an on-call rotation, all engineers on the team are expected to participate in the rotation as part of their employment. Applicants are encouraged to ask for more details of the rotations to which the applicant is applying.
Requirements- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field involving coding (e.g., physics or mathematics) or equivalent technical experience
- Minimum of 12 years of experience as a software engineer
- Must have worked in a consumer user-facing team (versus a platform team, a developer-facing API-based product, etc)
- Must have a strong mix of skills and depth across multiple areas, including three or more of frontend, mobile, search, databases, storage, concurrency, and modern ML and LLM-based APIs and agentic frameworks
- Experience working on a consumer-facing product onboarding flow on web
