Role Description

As a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, you will own company critical, loosely defined technical problems with multi year impact, operating at the intersection of technology, product, business strategy, and applied AI. You will define long term technical direction for customer facing experiences used by millions, identifying where AI meaningfully improves customer value and translating evolving business context and industry advances into durable, multi area strategies and roadmaps that shape how Dropbox builds, scales, and innovates, while remaining hands on in software development where it provides the greatest leverage.

Your influence will span organizations, setting foundational architecture, driving execution standards, and aligning senior technical and product leaders across boundaries. You will lead the responsible introduction and adoption of AI across product capabilities and engineering workflows, bring clarity to the most complex decisions, institutionalize engineering excellence, and contribute directly through critical design, prototyping, and code reviews.

In return, you will operate as a trusted technical partner to senior leadership, shape systems and platforms including AI powered foundations that define Dropbox’s future, and act as a company level technical strategist, advancing Dropbox’s mission to create a more enlightened way of working.

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

• Own and drive technical outcomes across multiple teams and organizations, delivering company critical customer and business impact at scale.
• Define long term technical strategy and partner with senior Product and Engineering leaders as the technical owner for the most important company objectives.
• Tackle the most ambiguous and far reaching technical and product problems, shaping what the company builds as much as how it builds it.
• Remain deeply hands on in software development, owning and implementing the most critical, complex, and foundational parts of the system where leverage is highest.
• Influence and align roadmaps across organizations, resolving structural bottlenecks and changing how Dropbox builds and operates.
• Architect and evolve foundational systems (this involves both frontend and backend systems) and platforms that enable new product capabilities and operate reliably at the scale of hundreds of millions of users.
• Model exceptional technical judgment and execution rigor, setting and sustaining high engineering standards across a distributed, virtual environment
• Drive AI adoption both to increase productivity and to produce AI based features.

Requirements

• Advanced degree in Computer Science or a related technical field involving substantial software development, or equivalent industry experience demonstrating deep technical mastery.
• 15+ years of experience designing, building, and evolving large scale software systems with sustained impact across multiple teams or organizations.
• Demonstrated success operating at a Principal level, owning company critical technical problems and influencing long term technical direction.
• Strong experience building consumer facing products at scale, with a deep understanding of user experience, performance, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Broad and deep technical expertise across multiple domains, including several of frontend, mobile, search, databases, storage systems, concurrency, and distributed systems.
• Practical experience applying modern ML, LLM based APIs, and agentic frameworks in production systems, with sound judgment around quality, cost, and risk.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and persuasively to senior engineering, product, and executive audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience defining and scaling company wide platforms or architectural standards that are adopted across multiple organizations.
• Proven track record of leading the introduction of new technologies such as AI or ML into core products or engineering workflows with durable impact.
• Experience operating in highly distributed, virtual first engineering organizations at global scale.

Compensation

Company Description

Dropbox isn’t just a workplace—it’s a living lab for more enlightened ways of working. We're a global community of bold visionaries and resourceful doers who are shaping the future of Dropbox—and with it the future of work. Our Virtual First model combines the autonomy of a distributed workplace with the power of human connection, making space for both meaningful work and meaningful relationships. With our start-up mindset and enterprise-level opportunities, you can be who you are and grow into who you’re meant to be. Here, you can own your impact to make work more intuitive, joyful, and human—for you as a Dropboxer and for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. If you're ready to push boundaries—and yourself— Dropbox is ready for you.

Team Description

The Dropbox Engineering Team builds the technology that creates more enlightened ways of working for hundreds of millions of people. Every day, our platforms—including Dropbox Dash, Dropbox Sign, and our core sync engine—handle over a billion files for users worldwide, creating engineering challenges as great as the opportunity for impact. Our software engineering team uses a range of technologies to solve interesting problems, including Python, React, Node.js, JavaScript, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Android development. We think like a startup but build for an enterprise, exploring new possibilities that transform how people work. If you're excited about turning complex technical challenges into intuitive solutions at scale, join our Engineering team. Areas of work include Machine Learning Engineers, Infrastructure Engineer, Product SWE Frontend and Backend, Mobile Software Engineers (iOS and Android), Engineering Manager, Data Engineer, Software Development Engineer in Test, Security Engineering, Site Reliability Engineer, Technical Program Managers, Network Engineer, Datacenter Engineer, Technical Supply Chain Manager and more.

Dropbox is an equal opportunity employer. We are a welcoming place for everyone, and we do our best to make sure all people feel supported and connected at work. A big part of that effort is our support for members and allies of internal groups like Asians at Dropbox, BlackDropboxers, enABLE, TODOS (Latinx), Pridebox (LGBTQ), Vets at Dropbox, and Women at Dropbox.